JohnstonThe Voiding of Weak Nature PDF

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Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

Volume 33, Number 1, 2012
The Voiding of Weak Nature

The Transcendental Materialist
Kernels of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie
Adrian Johnston
1. Revivifying Hegel—Breathing New Life into a Possible

Philosophy of Nature
Not many of Hegel’s commentators and critics bother to refer

directly to his Naturphilosophie as elaborated primarily in the second
volume of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Amongst even
this minority, only some are sympathetic to the Hegelian engagement
with nature and the natural sciences. In short, the Hegel of the
Philosophy of Nature has very few defenders.
For those handful of partisans of the philosophy of Hegel who refuse
to jettison its unpopular Naturphilosophie—the reasons for its unpopu-
larity, both historical and conceptual, are multiple and complex1—it has
become commonplace to remark upon its sidelining within and beyond
Hegelian circles. The fact that Hegel’s speculations regarding the
realms of the natural have fallen into widespread neglect, occasionally
resurfacing solely for perfunctory critical dismissals and disparage-
ment, is now a truism usually uttered as a matter of course in the
opening observations of those rare efforts to reconstruct faithfully this
German idealist’s philosophy of nature. Such scholarly exegetes as
Frederick Beiser,2 Stephen Houlgate,3 Alain Lacroix,4 Michael John
Petry,5 and Alison Stone6 all complain (quite rightly, in my view7) about
the unfairness and indefensibility of this post-Popperian tendency to
ignore what Hegel has to say apropos nature and its investigation by
empirical approaches and experimental methods. Indeed, the title of an
essay by Emmanuel Renault poses, not without a markedly audible
tone of seriousness, a question testifying to this situation: “Had Hegel
written a Naturphilosophie?”8
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Of course, such things as Hegel’s advocacy of Goethe’s theory of color

contra Newton’s optics and his pre-Darwinian categorical rejection of
the possibility of natural evolution have turned into embarrassments
for those of his successors who wish to present an intellectually
respectable portrait of this philosopher to the uninitiated and uncon-
verted. Quite predictably, several of the speculative gambles taken on
certain determinate contents of the natural sciences of the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries haven’t proven to be winning
bets over the longer haul of the history of ideas. Nevertheless, these
scattered blemishes on the record of the Hegelian philosophy of nature
shouldn’t, strictly on their own, be enough to justify and prompt its
abandonment in toto. In the absence of solid arguments to the contrary,
nothing should stop a charitable interpreter of Hegel from sifting
through the text of the Philosophy of Nature with the aim of salvaging
and rebuilding what is of lasting value and legitimacy, both theoretical
and empirical, to be found therein.
However, on both sides of the analytic-Continental divide, deep-run-
ning forces and trends generally prevailing in the unfolding of philoso-
phy after Hegel have conspired to push Hegelian Naturphilosophie into
disrepute and obscurity. Instances of his having been on the wrong side
of the history of the sciences, such as the above-mentioned pro-Goethe
and anti-evolution positions, are taken as symptomatic of an overreach-
ing philosophical hubris pretending to be able to legislate in an a priori
manner over the a posteriori sciences of the natural world. This oft-pur-
ported pomposity makes Hegel’s misjudgments and errors concerning
some of the empirical components of his philosophy of nature into
damning pieces of evidence indicting the fundamental soundness of the
whole of this sector of his system (if not his system tout court, especially
for those who view its “absolute idealism” as an absurd metaphysics of
a transcendent, God-like mega-Mind pulling the strings of finite natu-
ral and human realities dangling puppet-like in a logically determined
Below). The Anglo-American analytic and Continental European philo-
sophical traditions of the twentieth century share, in addition to an
obsession with language (à la plethora of permutations of the “linguis-
tic turn”), anti-metaphysical proclivities not infrequently manifesting
themselves in varied rejections of and polemics against what Hegel is
seen as representing in the Western philosophical past.
The current phase of Hegel’s English-speaking reception remains
largely under the shadow cast by Charles Taylor’s bulky 1975 study of
the panoramic sweep of his thought. Taylor works at maneuvering his
and Hegel’s readers into confronting a forced choice between either a
Hegel with a ridiculously puffed up and overly ambitious metaphysics
of “cosmic” Spirit (i.e., an implausible sort of absolute idealism as
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JOHNSTON/THE VOIDING OF WEAK NATURE
described in the preceding paragraph) or a Hegel shorn of this philo-

sophically untenable mysticism of divine universal Geist (i.e., a histori-
cized Hegelianism disburdened of Hegel’s more difficult and provoca-
tive trans-historical commitments at the levels of ontology and episte-
mology).9 With these supposedly being the lone two alternatives, such
contemporary giants of Anglo-American scholarship on German ideal-
ism as Robert Pippin10 and Allen Wood,11 accepting (with differing
degrees of implicitness and explicitness, awareness and unawareness)
the constraining binary coordinates laid down by Taylor’s interpreta-
tion, repudiate the overblown metaphysical/onto-theological Hegel (as
portrayed by Taylor) and exclusively embrace, as ostensibly the sole
alternative (albeit each, Pippin and Wood, with their distinctive caveats
and qualifications), the deflated quasi-Kantian, socio-historical Hegel
acceptable to the tastes of analytic philosophers of language and
American pragmatists, with their post-metaphysical palettes. What’s
more, the chapter devoted to the Philosophy of Nature in Taylor’s Hegel
is the shortest of the twenty composing the book, counting a mere
twelve pages out of almost six hundred; therein, Taylor writes it off as
“derivative” (vis-à-vis Schelling and German romanticism)12 and, in
places, “disastrous.”13 Pippin goes so far as to deem the second volume
of the Encyclopedia to be a wholly unrewarding and completely unim-
portant part of Hegel’s philosophical system best left in the dustbin of
intellectual history even by die-hard Hegelians.14 With friends like
these, Hegel, who did indeed write the Philosophy of Nature as the mid-
dle third of his encyclopedic apparatus, certainly doesn’t need enemies.
On the Continental side of Hegel’s reception, the backlash against
construals (of varying degrees of inaccuracy) of Hegelian absolute ideal-
ism begins, as is well known, during Hegel’s lifetime with Schelling’s
attacks (ensuing soon after the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit), that
wound the latter and institute a break between these two former
friends and collaborators. Starting with Schelling, a long line of
Hegelian discontents forms, a line reading like a “who’s who” of the last
two centuries of European philosophy: Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer,
Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and on through the rest of the twentieth cen-
tury up to such figures as Deleuze and Derrida. Of course, twentieth-
century Marxist theory in Europe remains, in line with its nineteenth-
century original sources, self-consciously (albeit ambivalently) indebted
to Hegelian dialectics. Engels and Dietzgen are inspired by the
Philosophy of Nature as well as by much of the rest of Hegel’s philoso-
phy. But, starting with the early Lukács, Hegel’s philosophy of nature—
incidentally, it ought not to be confused with the Schellingian strains
responsible for the prevailing bad reputation of German idealist
Naturphilosophie as repeatedly derided by Freud,15 among many
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others16—gets tacitly rubbished along with the pointed trashing of the

Engelsian “dialectics of nature.”17 Similarly, Béatrice Longuenesse,
driven into the depths of Hegelianism thanks to Althusser and French
controversies bearing upon the Hegel-Marx rapport,18 blames the
Engels of the Dialectics of Nature, in the opening paragraph of her
Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics, for helping to discredit Hegel’s philoso-
phy as a whole,19 a philosophy she ties quite tightly to Kant’s anti-real-
ist transcendental idealism (as does Pippin eight years later in his
enormously influential, and hotly contested, 1989 study). So-called
“Western Marxism” and its offshoots come to accept the young Lukács’
condemnatory verdict without question as the decisive last word on any
and every Naturdialektik.20 Combined with virulent allergic reactions to
modernity’s empirical and experimental sciences of nature across vast
swathes of both the political (including the far right) and philosophical
spectrums (not only Marxism, but also phenomenology, existentialism,
select currents of structuralism and post-structuralism, etc.), the
European continent of the twentieth century (with the exception of a
handful of hard-core German Hegel specialists) is a cold, inhospitable
place for the Hegel of the Philosophy of Nature, however much welcom-
ing recognition is accorded to the other Hegels of the rest of this monu-
mental philosophical corpus.
2. From Bern to Jena—The Oldest Agenda of Hegelianism
I will restrict myself in the remainder of this essay to tracing a bare-

bones outline of an atypical (albeit arguably justifiable) depiction of
Hegel anchored in particular features of his handlings of nature. This
heterodox Hegel (as heterodox by comparison with hegemonic, albeit
contestable, Hegelian orthodoxies past and present) is both a realist
and a materialist who readily acknowledges and respects various
modes and instances of radically irreducible contingency.21 Respecting
the chronological sequence of Hegel’s writings, I will begin with some
pre-Phenomenology pieces (drawn mostly from the Jena period
[1801–1807]), turning my attention thereafter to the Phenomenology
itself, and finally coming to the later-period, Heidelberg- and Berlin-
era Encyclopedia and related texts. The Hegel who will emerge from
this rereading is the great-grandfather of transcendental materialism.
In a 1796 fragment fittingly entitled “The Earliest System-Program
of German Idealism,” the young Hegel, while a Hofmeister in Bern,
reflects upon some of the philosophical ramifications of the French
Revolution bequeathed to Kant and his successors (this becoming, as is
common knowledge, a lifelong line of reflection in Hegel’s thought22).
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Quickly jumping from the politics of practical philosophy to the

(meta)physics of theoretical philosophy (to resort very appropriately in
this setting to Kant’s division between the theoretical and the practi-
cal), Hegel announces:
Since the whole of metaphysics falls for the future within moral
theory . . . this Ethics will be nothing less than a complete system of
all ideas or of all practical postulates (which is the same thing). The
first Idea is, of course, the presentation of myself as an absolutely
free entity. Along with the free, self-conscious essence, there stands
forth—out of nothing—an entire world, the one true and thinkable
creation out of nothing.—Here shall descend into the realms of
physics; the question is this: how must a world be constituted for a
moral entity? I would like to give wings once more to our backward
physics, that advances laboriously by experiments.23
He immediately proceeds to add:

Thus, if philosophy supplies the ideas, and experience the data, we
may at last come to have in essentials the physics that I look for-
ward to for later times. It does not appear that our present-day
physics can satisfy a creative spirit such as ours is or ought to be.24
On Hegel’s reading, the practical elevation of freedom to historical cen-

ter stage in the France of 1789 is a political event—this revolt brings to
an explosive, spectacular climax the implications flowing from the spir-
itual revolution originating in the sixteenth-century German-speaking
world (i.e., the Protestant Reformation with its individualism)—theo-
retically mirrored in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte (with these
philosophies being interpreted here as founded upon a new emphasis
on the absolute primacy of thorough-going subjective autonomy).25
Roughly contemporaneous with the beginnings of Schelling’s post-
Kantian dabblings in Naturphilosophie, Hegel calls for a rethinking of
the nature of natural science in its very being on the basis of this fresh
conception of the inviolable practical and theoretical privileges to be
accorded to free subjectivity. This heralded project is not only one guid-
ing thread of a dialectical endeavor to transform simultaneously and in
tandem ideas of Nature and Spirit,26 but also a core component of tran-
scendental materialism as I conceive it.27
When Slavoj Žižek asks, “What ontology does freedom imply?”28 this
deserves to be heard as an echo of a question Hegel (as quoted above)
raises at the outset of his philosophical career: “How must a world be
constituted for a moral entity [Wie muß eine Welt für ein moralisches
Wesen beschaffen sein]?”29 What’s more, Hegel’s employment of the word
“physics” (Physik),30 in line with its standard usage at the time, refers to
the post-Galilean, post-Baconian natural sciences as epitomized by
Newtonian mechanics. Hence, the Hegel of 1796 already foreshadows his
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1807 substance avec subject (as also does the Hegel of the Frankfurt-
period “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate”31 [1798–1800] as well as
the Jena-period Glauben und Wissen32 [1802] in theosophical fashions),
namely a rendering immanent of spiritual subjectivity to natural objec-
tivity such that the significance and status of “materialism” and “natu-
ralism” as science-shaped philosophical positions are fundamentally
altered in the process. (The Schelling of 1809 and after, a figure of
whom Žižek is particularly fond, moves along similar lines,33 although
Hegel never brings himself to recognize any advances in Schelling’s
philosophizing after the latter’s youthful philosophies of nature and
identity of the late 1790s and early 1800s.34) With what evolves into
Hegel’s vision of nature as an auto-sundering, self-shattering substance
(a vision to be fleshed out subsequently), Gérard Lebrun identifies as
one of the goals of Hegelianism “a revision of its [nature’s] ontological
status.”35 Lebrun’s explanation of this, which I think is correct, is that
“human nature,” as embedded from start to finish within the lone plane
of material nature, is a part of a (pre/non-human) nature having
exceeded and broken with itself through internally giving rise to logics
of “denaturalization” bursting the bubbles of any cosmos-embracing
harmony.36 What’s more, this could be characterized as analogous to
Kant’s “Copernican revolution” as described in the preface to the second
edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.37 That is to say, instead of asking
what spiritual subjectivity must be like in order to fit in with natural
substance, Hegel, Žižek, and I invert the question (without, for all that,
simply reverting to an idealism as equally vulgar as reductive or elimi-
native materialism): What must natural substance be like in order to
generate, accommodate, and contain within itself spiritual subjectivity?
Before taking up these themes in the Phenomenology, on the way to
Hegel’s mature system of the Heidelberg and Berlin periods, briefly
underlining a few textual highlights from the Jena years prior to the
Phenomenology is in order. During this time of his alliance with
Schelling, Hegel associates a slogan with Schelling’s identity philoso-
phy which the latter adopts approvingly:38 “the Absolute itself is the
identity of identity and non-identity [das Absolute selbst aber ist
darum die Identität der Identität und der Nichtidentität]”;39 or, as the
former puts it in 1800, a year before the Differenzschrift, this living
reality is “the union of union and non-union [die Verbindung der
Verbindung und der Nichtverbindung].”40 Hegel makes this statement
his own and unwaveringly holds to it even long after, and despite, the
split provoked by the Phenomenology’s renowned denigration of
Schellingian Identitatsphilosophie as nothing more than a vacuous
Spinozistic “night in which . . . all cows are black” (PS 16). One popular
but inaccurate textbook portrayal of Hegel is as a thinker enamored of
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organic (w)holism, mesmerized by grandiose visions of a divine totality

(although, admittedly, this picture is not without its exegetical
excuses). Sticking just to his Jena writings for the time being, at the
exact moment when Hegel arrives at his formulation of absolute iden-
tity also taken up by Schelling, he cautions that “the claims of separa-
tion [Trennung] must be admitted just as much as those of identity. . . .
Philosophy must give the separation [Trennen] into subject and object
its due” (DFS 156; DFSS 96). Suffice it to note for now, a wholeheart-
edly organicist philosopher wouldn’t be able to do real justice to the
rights of “separation” (as difference, non-identity, non-union, etc.) as
advocated by this Hegel of the Differenzschrift. I say this in anticipation
of soon advancing in detail my interpretation according to which
Hegel’s philosophy, especially his Naturphilosophie, is committed to,
among other things, a strong version of what is nowadays labeled
“emergentism” qua a theoretical paradigm in the sciences of matter.
(For instance, in a Zusatz contained in the introduction to the
Philosophy of Nature, Hegel insists, in a proto-emergentist fashion, on
the occurrence of “leaps” [Sprünge] in the blossoming development of
natural structures out of each other.41) Compactly phrased in Hegelese,
separation is a discontinuity immanently arising out of continuity. In
other words, and to concretize this a bit more, the subject separating
from substance, achieving self-relating independence thereby (i.e., rup-
turing whatever presupposed unified identity substance enjoyed with
itself, if it ever did), is a splitting off from the substantial objectivity of
nature generated within and out of this same natural substance itself.
Such would be the axiomatic claim of the Hegel who is a major ancestor
of transcendental materialism. Likewise, not only do I enthusiastically
agree with Kenneth Westphal when he asserts that “Hegel sought to
avoid both substance dualism and eliminative reductionism by develop-
ing a sophisticated and subtle emergentism”42—I consider Westphal to
be even more insightful when he notes that, “To say that Hegel is an
emergentist is to reject strongly holistic interpretations of Hegel’s
views, according to which ‘the whole’ has ontological priority over its
parts and determines their characteristics, or at least, more so than
vice versa.”43 Willem DeVries paints a similar picture of Hegel on Natur
und Geist through combined references, pre-Hegel, to Aristotle’s hylo-
morphism and, post-Hegel, to select sorts of supervenience theories in
Anglo-American analytic philosophy of mind.44
Of course, another commonplace caricature of Hegel, one that might
be conjured up by certain skeptics of a science-compatible materialist
recuperation of Hegelianism today, is that of the wacky spiritualist
mystic enthralled by a radically anti-realist absolutism of cosmic Spirit,
a subjectivist solipsism writ large as the God of universal Mind. This
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caricature is underwritten by a crude, erroneous conflation of Hegel’s

absolute idealism with a Kantian-style subjective idealism he never
tires of harshly criticizing right up until his death. Regardless of the
misleading label, Hegelian “idealism” involves an objective realism and,
arguably and relatedly, a materialism of the subjective as much as an
idealism of the objective (the latter amounting to an assertion of the in-
principle infinite openness of the object-world to minded knowing). I,
and many others, have stressed the indefensibility of reading Hegel as
a subjective idealist,45 and the debunking of this obviously false image
doesn’t need yet another reiteration here. Prior to the Phenomenology,
in and after which Hegel’s deconstructions and trashings of subjective
idealism are glaringly and undeniably apparent, Hegel already warns
multiple times against his audience hearing his use of words like “idea”
and “consciousness” as tantamount to hoisting the flag of a Kantian
and/or Fichtean brand of idealist subjectivism.46
One of Žižek’s favorite passages in the whole of the Hegelian œuvre
is located in the 1805–1806 Jenaer Realphilosophie.47 Therein, Hegel
characterizes human subjectivity thus:
The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains
everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many repre-
sentations, images, of which none belongs to him—, or which are
not present. This night, the interior of nature [das Innere der
Natur], that exists here—pure self,—in phantasmagorical represen-
tations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head,
—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it,
and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one
looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful
[furchtbar].48
The subject as “the night of the world [die Nacht der Welt],”49 a motif
Žižek traces from the Cartesian cogito to the Lacanian “barred S” ($), is
identified by Hegel with “the interior of nature.” This already is to hint,
as arguably becomes manifestly evident in later works (the three-vol-
ume Encyclopedia first and foremost), that, as Lacan would phrase it,
there is something in nature more than nature itself (in the sub-section
on “Psychology” in the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel redeploys this Jena-
era image, describing human “intelligence” as, in certain respects,
resembling a “night-like mine or pit [nächtlichen Schacht],”50 a “blank
night [einfachen Nacht]”) (PM 454). Hegel here hints that nature,
rather than being the placid organic evenness of a uniform totality
undisturbed by any destabilizing imbalances, is perturbed from within
itself, containing in its material immanence unevenness introduced by
points of lopsided, violent withdrawal and condensation, whirlpools
coming to demarcate spiraling orbits of enclosed self-relating kinetics.
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These internally-generated and subsisting loci, as ravenous black holes

of inwardizing gravity, are symptoms of, as it were, naturally-unnatu-
ral negativity, a nocturnal power of differentiating separation breaking
away from the grounds of unifying identity but from within which this
power explodes all the same. The potency of denaturalizing, potentially
subject-forming negativity arises out of a zero-level feebleness of nature
qua nature’s lack of steely-strong bonds of unbreakable, seamless, and
monistic integration. As the young Althusser eloquently remarks in
1947 (on the occasion of the publication of Kojève’s lectures on the
Phenomenology) with respect to the above passage, “Night is not, in
Hegel, the blind peace of darkness . . . [i]t is, by the grace of man, the
birth of Light.”51 He continues:
Hegel saw in man a sick animal who neither dies nor recovers, but
stubbornly insists on living on in a nature terrified of him. The ani-
mal kingdom reabsorbs its monsters, the economy its crises: man
alone is a triumphant error who makes his aberration the law of
the world. At the level of nature, man is an absurdity, a gap in
being, an ‘empty nothing,’ a ‘Night.’52
Hegelian nature is constitutively unable to abort, reabsorb, or rein back

in the human monsters it gives birth to as a matter of contingency, too
powerless to triumph over these unruly, rebellious creatures, its own
(by-)products, embodying insistent powers of disruptive, unchained
negativity53 (as I’ve already pointed out on a number of occasions,54
Hegel repeatedly refers to the “impotence” or “weakness” (Ohnmacht) of
nature in passages to be underscored below). Or, as Catherine Malabou
expresses in her admirable unpacking of “habit” (die Gewohnheit) in
Hegel’s later systematic philosophical anthropology of subjective spirit,
“what is exemplary about man is less human-ness than his status as an
insistent accident.”55
Following the readings of Hegel put forward by Althusser, Žižek, and
Malabou, it can be maintained that the accidental and contingent,
specifically as epitomized in embodied human subjects, is able to
declare its independence from and achieve a type of victory over the
sheer, mere givenness of nature thanks to a certain degree of anarchy
reigning within the latter, an absence of iron-clad self-consistency and
ordering, governing wholeness. The non-All, not-One status of the
Otherless barred Real of natural substance, as material being pervaded
and perturbed by the differentiating, splitting powers of the negative, is
the material condition of possibility for the immanent genesis of spiri-
tual subjectivity, the ontological groundless ground before and behind
the existence of subjects. In short, what permits substance to become
subject is the disorganized fragility of the former, a lack of coordination
inherent to it. That is to say, humans are what they are partly in virtue
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of being the children of frail and neglectful parents whose authority is

easily and often defied, offspring largely abandoned to their own
devices with little guidance and no supervision.
Immediately before poetically pronouncing subjectivity to be a horri-
fying abyssal vortex of midnight madness, Hegel lends further weight
to this just-articulated gloss on the Jenaer Realphilosophie. The
1803–1804 First Philosophy of Spirit depicts subjective autonomy as a
stubborn point of contraction.56 Hegel’s 1804 lectures on Natural Law
have this to propose apropos the same set of topics:
it is not philosophy which takes the particular for something positive,
just because it is a particular. On the contrary, philosophy does so
only if the particular has won independence [Selbständigkeit] as a
single part outside the absolute cohesion of the whole. The absolute
totality restricts itself as necessity in each of its spheres [Potenz(en)],
produces itself out of them as a totality, and recapitulates there the
preceding spheres [Potenzen] just as it anticipates the succeeding
ones. But one of these is the greatest power [die größte Macht], in
whose color and character the totality appears, yet without being in
any way restrictive for life any more than water is for the fish or air
for the bird.57
Although organized around a discussion of law, these lectures veer into

treatments of philosophical issues theoretical as well as practical (this
quotation being one instance of such digressions). Considering that the
pre-Phenomenology Jena period is a time of cooperation with the early
Schelling of the philosophies of identity and nature, it wouldn’t be inde-
fensible to hear Hegel’s uttering of the word “Potenzen” (a term featur-
ing centrally in Schellingian Naturphilosophie) as perhaps signaling a
link to the concerns of a philosophy of nature. In this light, the preced-
ing passage can be construed as claiming, as a real matter of ontology
and not merely the ideational constructs of philosophical thinking in
isolation, that autonomous subjectivity (i.e., “the particular” that “has
won independence [Selbständigkeit] as a single part outside the abso-
lute cohesion of the whole”) is generated within and out of natural sub-
stance. This sort of subject, “the greatest power [die größte Macht]” qua
Hegelian “concrete universal” (i.e., “in whose color and character the
totality appears,” the grain of sand refracting the universe of which it’s
a tiny bit), is a particular part, a disequilibrium run amok, that comes
to sever itself from the (dis)equilibrium of the universal whole within
which it first took shape as an inner disturbance. Once again, as in
“The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism” of 1796, the pro-
cess of self-sundering substance becoming subject is sketched well in
advance of the Phenomenology.
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Furthermore, in both the First Philosophy of Spirit and lectures on

Natural Law, Hegel provides similar additional foreshadowings of his
soon-to-follow 1805–1806 portrait of free subjectivity as “the night of
the world.” These two texts, anticipating an aspect of the famous “lord-
ship and bondage” dialectic of the 1807 Phenomenology (PS 178–96) (an
aspect particularly dear to Kojève58), each maintain that the negativity
establishing the autonomous subject in its willful isolated particularity
is closely associated with death literally as well as figuratively (i.e., as
aggression, annihilation, cancellation, destruction, negation, and the
like in their multiple senses).59 This association, one regularly reiter-
ated by Hegel, lends significant support to Žižek’s guiding program to
demonstrate the philosophical thesis that the subject of German ideal-
ism is fundamentally equivalent to the Freudian-Lacanian death
drive—the basic gist of this thesis being that a restless, unsettling Real
(i.e., the Todestrieb) within human nature more than human nature
itself (to paraphrase the Lacan of the eleventh seminar once again)
gives rise to, bursts forth as, a denaturalized and denaturalizing indif-
ference to and immanent transcendence of body, environment, and the
ensemble of biological pressures stemming from organic life (i.e., inde-
pendent, free-standing subjectivity as a peculiar potency of negativ-
ity).60 The living human being accedes to becoming a subject proper if
and when (and only for as long as) s/he taps into this strange natural
power of denaturalization allowing for a disregard, sometimes serene
and at times brutal, of such things as survival, well-being, and home-
ostasis. Since I have discussed this Žižekian thesis in depth elsewhere,
I now will move on to touching upon Hegel’s Phenomenology and subse-
quent system with the intention of presenting a convincing, persuasive
transcendental materialist Hegel.
3. The Self-Subversion of Modern Science—Scientific Reason

and the Phenomenology of Spirit
Having traced the pre-1807 forerunners of the “substance as subject”

line from the Phenomenology’s preface in the preceding section, I now
want to examine the topics of natural science, naturalism, and materi-
alism in the Phenomenology itself. The fifth chapter (“The Certainty
and Truth of Reason”), opening the section on “Reason,” is the pivotal
locus of this first of Hegel’s major works in connection with my motiva-
tions and program. In particular, the part of this chapter on “Observing
Reason” is of special importance for me. With this stretch of the
Phenomenology being focused on the modern natural sciences, it has
been, and continues to be, largely neglected by commentators, espe-
cially when compared to the scholarly attention generously lavished on
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the two sections before the section on “Reason” (i.e., “Consciousness”

and “Self-Consciousness”) as well as the sections after (starting with
“Spirit”)—and this is in line with the still-predominant aversion to
Naturphilosophie as a whole holding sway amongst the majority of
Hegel’s readers and critics. Robert Solomon, noting this neglect,61 men-
tions that Taylor, in his remarks concerning “Observing Reason,”62 “fin-
ishes it off in two paragraphs”63 (being of a piece with the fact that
Taylor’s treatment of the Philosophy of Nature counts for just roughly
two percent of his entire book). As I hope to show in what follows, the
section on “Reason” not only is of interest to anyone seeking to recon-
struct Hegel’s philosophy of nature—this portion is a key hinge, a cru-
cial turning point, in the dialectical unfurling of the Phenomenology in
its global integrity and imposing completeness.
“Reason” is the third section of the Phenomenology. As is very well
known, sections one and two are driven along by a dialectic privileging,
first, the pole of objectivity (i.e., for “consciousness,” truth is presumed
to reside on the side of the object) and then, second, the other pole of
subjectivity (i.e., for “self-consciousness,” truth is presumed to reside
on the side of the subject) respectively. Reason is entered into from the
position of the figure of “unhappy consciousness,” with this transition
being one of those in this philosophical narrative reflecting a known
historical development (as any minimally attentive reader of the
Phenomenology readily can ascertain, Hegel frequently deviates from
the actual, factual linear sequences of history, sometimes favoring “log-
ical” over properly historical orderings of his material). The historical
development in question is the shift from a medieval Christian
(Catholic) outlook born within the decay of the ancient Roman world
(i.e., unhappy consciousness) to the universe of modern science, a
Weltanschauung launched early in the seventeenth century by Bacon
and Galileo.
To this day, religious faith and scientific knowledge often strike the
lazy eye as being irreconcilably at loggerheads, as a black and white
either/or à la non-speculative “understanding” (Verstand) in Hegel’s
exact technical sense of the word (i.e., as crucially distinct from specu-
lative reason [Vernunft]) (PS 2). But, with his characteristic penchant
for subverting what initially appear to be diametrically opposed, mutu-
ally exclusive stances, Hegel uncovers the threads of continuity binding
the nature studied by the secular sciences to the all-embracing,
unchanging God of the theology espoused by unhappy consciousness.
The mutating, restless consciousness of the Phenomenology, the pro-
tagonist of this long odyssey, morphs into the figure christened “reason”
when it becomes aware of itself as the mediating “middle term”
between universality and particularity. To be more precise, the dialecti-
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cal movement from medieval religion to modern science consists of two

intertwined transformations: One, consciousness qua protagonist of the
Phenomenology comes to see itself as the mediator joining the anony-
mous “view from nowhere” of the universal (earlier incarnated in the
deity of pre-modern Christianity) with the particular as constellations
of empirical entities and events64 (the upshot here being that Baconian
scientific method retains monotheism’s old God’s-eye perspective in a
new, sublimated guise); two, this mediating belief in the created world
being governed by a rational and benevolent creator becomes an
axiomatic conviction in the natural world being ruled by regular, know-
able patterns of ordering causal laws (this conviction is prominently on
display in the writings of Galileo and Descartes and crops up strikingly
in the twentieth century when Einstein insists that “God doesn’t play
dice”) (PS 233). Additionally, as Hegel later acknowledges in his Berlin-
era lectures on religion, Judaism as well as Christianity makes a cru-
cial contribution to what becomes modern secular science: The “disen-
chantment” of law-bound nature carried out by the sciences can be
viewed as a secularized version of Judaism’s earlier gesture of starkly
separating the finite immanence of the mundane material world from
the infinite transcendence of the divine.65
In the aftermath of the internally induced self-implosions of object-
centered consciousness and subject-centered self-consciousness, reason,
in unconscious recognition of the fatal one-sidedness of its predeces-
sors, spontaneously embraces, and this for the first time in the
Phenomenology, a prototype of Hegelian absolute idealism. This is one
of several key anticipatory “moments of clarity” in the Phenomenology,
a brief flashing up within non/pre-philosophical consciousness of what
eventually will be realized and comprehended in its fullness “in-and-
for-itself” (an und für sich) (PS 19, 21, 26) by the “absolute knowing” of
philosophical consciousness. It is the initial surfacing for the subjectiv-
ity of non/pre-philosophical consciousness of the metaphysics (as a sys-
tematically interlinked ontology and epistemology) affirmed by Hegel in
his philosophical consciousness (i.e., absolute idealism). As such, the
moment he names “reason,” and especially “observing reason,” is of
enormous significance for his philosophy in its entirety.
Whereas self-consciousness, as the basic configuration of conscious-
ness immediately prior to reason, treats the surrounding objective
world as an alien Other—it’s worth remembering that unhappy con-
sciousness, the last instantiation of self-consciousness, is an outgrowth
of the figures of “Stoicism” and “skepticism”—reason becomes convinced
that its subjectivity and the world’s objectivity are capable of attaining
union in reconciliation by pinpointing structural isomorphisms in which
the concepts of subjectivity mirror the beings of objectivity and vice
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versa (PS 231–2) (DeVries, in his superlative extended commentary on

“subjective spirit” in the Philosophy of Mind, likewise speaks of “iso-
morphisms” [HTM 114], “congruencies” [HTM 110], and the like [HTM
175, 177–8, 196–7, 200] with respect to Hegel’s “healthy realism” [HTM
115]). In this vein, Hegel states, “Reason is the certainty of conscious-
ness that it is all reality; thus does idealism express its Notion” (PS
233). However, this isn’t the lopsided subjective idealism of Kant and
Fichte, an idealism subsumable under the heading of the previous sec-
tion of the Phenomenology (“Self-Consciousness”) (PS 235–9). Rather,
reason, in its spontaneous absolute idealism, obscurely feels itself com-
pelled to strike a balance between the preponderance of the object
posited by consciousness and the opposed preponderance of the subject
posited by self-consciousness. This balance is achieved by reason posit-
ing a mirroring equivalence between subjective and objective configura-
tions, namely an absolute idealism of the subject-object in which the
subject embodies objective structures (unlike in Kantian-style subjec-
tive idealism) as much as the object embodies subjective ones. The “it”
in the statement “Reason is the certainty of consciousness that it is all
reality” isn’t the conscious self qua isolated mind confronting an exter-
nal world from which it’s divorced and different in kind. Instead, this
“it” is composed of the ingredients common to the (potentially) synchro-
nized configurations and parallel processes of both subjectivity and
objectivity, ingredients making possible an awareness that the isomor-
phisms between subject and object are permutations expressive of a
logic that is neither subjective nor objective. This strange logic is what
“is all reality [ist alle Realität und Gegenwart]” (PS 233) and not Spirit
qua individual (self-)conscious mindedness in its ideality cosmically
(and comically) writ large (as opposed to mindless material reality in its
asubjective, unintelligent independence). Similarly, when Hegel, fur-
ther describing reason observant of nature a few pages later in the
Phenomenology, maintains apropos this rationality that, “the Notion . .
. has destroyed within itself [an sich] the indifferent subsistence of sen-
suous reality [das gleichgültige Bestehen der sinnlichen Wirklichkeit]”
(PS 248), this obviously isn’t to say that self-sufficient objective being
(i.e., “the indifferent subsistence of sensuous reality”) is destroyed,66 but
merely that, for cognizing, concept-mongering subjectivity, the indiffer-
ence of its Others is overcome “within itself” (with Hegel promptly
underscoring that “the Notion” [der Begriff] here is, as per absolute ide-
alism, objective as well as subjective [PS 249]).
Of course, in itself, the absolute idealism of reason isn’t yet this
same idealism “for itself,” namely as firmly grasped by absolute know-
ing at the end of the journey recounted in the Phenomenology. A couple
of features of this difference merit being noted before I proceed further.
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To begin with, Hegel emphasizes that, at this stage, reason abruptly

“asserts” (versichert) as a “certainty” (Gewißheit) that solid bonds of
trustworthy structural isomorphisms unite subjectivity and objectivity;
that it to say, reason has yet to prove the truth of its assertion to this
effect (PS 233). For instance, in the absence of the knowledge of philo-
sophical consciousness, the modern scientist’s belief in the through-
and-through intelligible rationality of the objective world-to-be-known
is just as much an article of faith as the Christian believer’s confidence
in the supposedly inviolable authority of an omnipotent and omniscient
creator (with the scientific former being interpreted by Hegel as a
dialectical outgrowth of the religious latter). Additionally, the philo-
sophical consciousness that already has traversed the phenomenologi-
cal “Stations of the Cross” on the “way of despair” (PS 78) leading from
non-philosophical consciousness up to itself is aware of the historical
situatedness and limiting contextual boundaries of modern secular sci-
entific rationality. By contrast, this rationality, like all of the figures and
shapes of consciousness prior to the conclusion of the Phenomenology,
tends to be, on its own, oblivious of and blind to its historicity, uncon-
scious of everything this history entails and brings with it (PS 234).
Indeed, both the formal and empirical/experimental sciences exhibit
strong tendencies to lapse into a default ahistoricism about themselves,
an amnesia eventually overcome via the recollecting brought about by
the hindsight of absolute knowing, by systematic philosophy as a true
“Science” (Wissenschaft) (PS 25, 78, 88).
Hence, at the start of the section on “Reason” in the Phenomenology,
conscious subjectivity-as-reason sets in motion a movement, one quite
familiar to aficionados of Hegelian thinking, in which this subjectivity
confidently steps outside itself into the objects facing it in order to find
itself within these, its Others (PS 237). For the modern scientist, these
objects are the things and phenomena of physical nature. So as to avoid
a likely and all-too-widespread misunderstanding, rational subjectiv-
ity’s negating of the foreign alterity of a/non-subjective objects, as per
Hegel’s absolute idealism, most definitely does not amount to the free-
standing objectivity prized by realisms and materialisms being absorbed
by and dissolved into the knowing subject; this is not the notorious case
of an insatiable, monad-like mega-Mind devouring and digesting the
entire expanse of non-mental being without leftovers. In fact, this erro-
neous appraisal of Hegelian “idealism” ought to be appreciated once one
realizes that, in the context presently under consideration, Hegel is
describing the activity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural
scientists with their instinctive naïve realist leanings and inclinations.
Moreover, what subjectivity-as-reason cancels out in its investigative
incursions into objects is not their objectivity (as mind-independent exis-
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tence), but, instead, their alterity qua fundamental difference-in-kind

vis-à-vis the conceptual structures operative on the side of the knowing
subject. Put differently, unknowable Otherness on the side of the object
gives way to the recognition of discernible, delineable structural paral-
lelisms between the “logics” at work in the twin realities of both sub-
jects and objects—and this without subject-separate objectivity ontolog-
ically vanishing without a trace or remainder into a solipsism of spiritual
subjectivity. Referring back to the Jena-era, Hegel-coined Schellingian
slogan casting the Absolute as the identity of identity and difference,
Hegelian absolute idealism, implicitly springing up with the
figure/shape of reason “certain of itself” (i.e., post-Baconian, post-
Galilean modern secular scientific rationality), not only establishes the
identity of subject and object, but, simultaneously and in a non-one-
sided fashion, maintains their difference too.
This is the juncture at which Hegel begins his discussion of the
empirical and experimental sciences of modernity under the heading
“Observing Reason.” Immediately prior to this sub-section of the
Phenomenology, he makes a few ambivalent remarks about Kant’s
transcendental unity of apperception that might not be crystal clear at
first glance to some readers (comments arguably echoed in part later in
the Science of Logic when he speaks of this Kantian unity as “one of the
profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure
Reason”67). The essential gist of this waving at Kant here amounts to a
comparing and contrasting of his subjective transcendental idealism
with the absolute idealism half-consciously adopted as a matter of
course by the reason being described in this specific phase of the
Phenomenology. On the positive hand, Kant’s “Transcendental
Deduction” demonstrates that, when it comes to knowledge, reciprocal
unifications, mutually reflecting syntheses brought about under the
aegis of concepts and categories, are necessary conditions of possibility
for knowledge at the dual, mirroring levels of both subject and object.
On the negative hand—this is an objection tirelessly raised by Hegel in
his drawn-out, lifelong settling of accounts with Kantianism—Kant
allegedly spoils his epistemology by confining, very much in line with
his subjectivism, what he calls “knowledge” to the subject’s apprehen-
sion of objects qua mere phenomena divorced from real being (i.e., real
being as pure receptivity, things-in-themselves, noumena, etc.).
Therefore, according to the Kantian critical system, to know means to
have a true grip on false appearances—with this, in Hegel’s estimation,
being a sad excuse for an epistemology, a poor, unsatisfying definition
of knowledge as pseudo-knowledge (PS 238).
In contrasting the subjectivism of transcendental idealism with rea-
son’s absolute idealism, Hegel mentions again the rational subject’s cer-
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tainty of being able to make good on its assertion that nothing to be

found in the objective domains of actual existence is essentially alien or
foreign to it, namely the alterity of an Otherness, an “x” qua je ne sais
quoi, different in kind from and ungraspable by the cognitive powers of
conceptualizing activity. By sharp contrast with Kantianism’s strict
division between knowable phenomenal objects-as-appearances and
unknowable (yet “thinkable”) noumenal things-in-themselves, every-
thing in reality is, in principle, open to the possibility of being truly
known in its real, self-standing independence by thinking subjectivity
(which isn’t the same as saying that everything is actually thus known
by an exhaustively all-encompassing, omniscient Geist). The Critique of
Pure Reason limits itself to asserting the certainty that the knowing
subject is an active agent responsible for constituting the objects of its
knowledge; for Hegel, this is a “profound and true insight,” although
one terribly distorted by Kant in being chained to an untenable anti-
realist subjectivism that can be show through dialectics to undermine
itself. The consciousness of modern secular scientific reason sets about
laboring to prove this Kantian assertion to itself, albeit in a sense unin-
tended by and at odds with Kant’s understanding of his critical-tran-
scendental turn (PS 238). This is one of those moments in the
Phenomenology in which historical chronology is disregarded in favor of
“logical” order (unlike the above-discussed transition from the section
on “Self-Consciousness” to that on “Reason”); as is obvious, Bacon,
Galileo, Descartes, and Newton historically come before the Kant of the
first Critique. In Hegel’s 1807 narrative, insofar as dialectical progress
transpires if and only if a resolution/solution bound up precisely with a
singular determinate deadlock/impasse happens to arise, this progress
need not unfold exclusively in a linear manner as does “history” à la
standard meaning of the word. As more logical than chronological, the
march of Hegelian dialectics is one in which resolutions/solutions can
and do sometimes precede in historical time the deadlocks/impasses
that they overcome through sublation (Aufhebung), as when an answer
pops up before its corresponding proper question is asked.
How does the “observing reason” of the modern sciences step beyond
(i.e., overcome qua sublate) Kantianism avant la lettre? How does it
begin providing an absolute idealist counter-balance to the one-sided-
ness of transcendental idealism’s subjectivism while, nonetheless and
at the same time, preserving what is insightful in the “Transcendental
Deduction” by raising Kant’s unity of apperception to the dignity of its
Notion? The part on “Observing Reason” opens with Hegel distinguish-
ing between “consciousness” as per the first section of the
Phenomenology (i.e., “Consciousness” as consisting of the three figures
of “sense-certainty,” “perception,” and “the understanding” described in
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the first three chapters of the book) and “reason” as per this third sec-
tion. He considers this distinction important to draw because of the
superficial resemblance between the two: Both consciousness and rea-
son direct their attention at objectivity; both of these figures/shapes of
the subject of the Phenomenology grant a certain priority to objects.
But, this isn’t an instance of a simple and straightforward return to an
earlier moment. Indeed, no stage of the Phenomenology is such an
instance—and this is because, for Hegelian dialectical thought overall,
it’s philosophically axiomatic that repetition is never pure, sheer repeti-
tion in that returns and reiterations always and inevitably introduce
differences, deviations, driftings, and so on (reversing a cliché, perhaps
it could be said in this context that the more things remain the same,
the more they change). The key contrast distinguishing consciousness
and reason is this: The former assumes a passive, receptive disposition
vis-à-vis the object, whereas the latter takes up an active, engaged rela-
tion to its objects. The spontaneous activity of reason, as epitomized by
the sciences of modernity, compels nature to speak and reveal her
secrets, employing special methods, devices, technologies, and lan-
guages (such as mathematics) to extract answers from interrogated
entities and events in the physical world (Kant himself, in the preface
to the B edition of the first Critique, already underscores this with ref-
erence to natural science as ushered onto the stage of the history of
ideas by Bacon and Galileo68). The natural scientist is confident in
his/her ability, through the right kinds of activities, to wrest responses
from a material universe whose lips are now powerless to remain
sealed, unable to resist the advances of scientific rationality so as to
preserve itself in the dark alterity of mute, sealed off mystery. Through
the tortured (and torturing) procedures of experimentation, observing
reason forces its way into nature, penetrating this formerly enigmatic
Other (PS 240–3) (Are there any analytic third ears listening?).
Moreover, unlike sense-certainty and perception, both of which aim (in
vain) at the unique, here-and-now particularity of their alien sensuous
objects as the presupposed truth-target to be hit, observation by reason
is preoccupied with what is universal(izable) in sensuous particulars
(as in the goal of the scientist to distill out laws of nature through the
practice of scientific method) (PS 244–6, 252–3).
But, the observing reason of the modern sciences (circa the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries) is fated to experience dissatisfaction
(this is, after all, the Calvary/Golgotha-like death march of the way of
despair, as warned in the Phenomenology’s introduction). Hegel
observes, “But even if Reason digs into the very entrails of things and
opens every vein in them so that it may gush forth to meet itself, it will
not attain this joy; it must have completed itself inwardly before it can
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experience the consummation of itself” (PS 241). This is the inaugural

explicit heralding of reason’s eventual dialectical undoing, its imma-
nently-generated self-subversion à la “determinate negation” (PS 24–5,
59). The crescendo of this internally triggered implosion manifests itself
in the well known phrenological infinite judgment “Spirit is a bone” (PS
343), phrenology being the last of a series of failed efforts by scientific
reasoning self-reflexively to understand itself in the inadequate terms
of non-dialectical materialism(s). The discussion of phrenology (PS
326–46) is preceded in Hegel’s text by discussions of such strategies
and tactics as mechanics, physics, chemistry, handwriting analysis,
associationist psychology (PS 298–308), and physiognomy (PS 312–24).
Of course, right before the early nineteenth century, post-Baconian,
post-Galilean modern science engenders the Enlightenment-era mecha-
nistic materialism of eighteenth-century France (i.e., that associated
with such authors as LaMettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and
Sade), a historical sequence accurately reflected in this narrative string
of the Phenomenology. That said, how does Hegel get from here, at the
start of the part on “Observing Reason,” to there, namely, to this auto-
deconstructing culmination of scientific rationality in its self-induced
phrenological collapse?
In its tacit absolute idealism in which the more it knows about
objects the more it knows about itself, the rational subject of scientific
observation is part and parcel of its deployed discourses and domains.
Furthermore, given that observing reason is a condition of the possibil-
ity for scientific knowledge—for Hegel, this amounts to the conscious
subjectivity of reason idealizing the reality of observed entities and
events in intellectually appropriating them as objects of its own concep-
tually-mediated knowing—any systematic science, as thorough and
complete, must include a scientific account of the subject of science, of
the observing consciousness responsible for the content of its observa-
tions. By its own lights, science is required to furnish a scientific expla-
nation of the scientific observer (i.e., the living human subject as an
active agent) (PS 242, 251). This is precisely what leads to the natural
sciences dialectically doing violence to themselves at their own hands
(PS 26, 80), de/in-completing themselves through inadvertent imma-
nent critique69 (as Wittgenstein and Husserl, each in his own way, later
indicate). How so?
To cut a long story short, observing reason sooner or later develops
out of itself, based on the inner workings of its scientific endeavors, a
fundamental distinction between the organic and the inorganic; it
divides nature into these two basic categories as part of its classifying,
ordering activities (PS 252–3, 258). But, insofar as its conceptualiza-
tions continue to be dictated by the non-speculative understanding (i.e.,
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Verstand as different from the speculative reasoning [Vernunft] of

philosophical consciousness proper), natural scientific rationality neces-
sarily cannot do justice to the notion of life that it itself produces when
abandoned to its own pursuits. The idea of the organic comes to exceed
and place in check the explanatory powers of the (observing) reason
from which it originates (i.e., the non-speculative understanding of the
contemplative consciousness of the scientists). For Hegel, the concept of
organic life is one that solely the reason of the speculative philosopher
can think adequately and fully—“Life . . . can be grasped only specula-
tively” (PN 337Z) (in the Phenomenology, at the start of the section on
“Self-Consciousness” as well as in the chapter on “Observing Reason,”
Hegel suggests this by highlighting structural isomorphisms between
desiring organic life and the conscious subjectivities at stake in dialecti-
cal phenomenology [PS 166–71, 258]). A strictly empirical, non-specula-
tive approach to the living is condemned to end up unproductively
regressing back to the previously-superseded standpoints of “percep-
tion” and “the understanding” (as per chapters two and three of the
Phenomenology). In advance of the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel (as
arguably a strong emergentist avant la lettre) already is alerting read-
ers to the claim that “organics” cannot be reduced down to “mechanics”
and “physics” (with these scientific sub-disciplines being arranged as
the three major sections of the second volume of the Encyclopedia).
Overall, Hegel’s anti-reductivist vision of the ensemble of the natural
sciences, as well as the other fields and sub-components of his real phi-
losophy (a philosophy covered by the second and third volumes of the
Encyclopedia), entails granting the different floors constituting the
philosophies of Nature and Spirit (at least relative) autonomy vis-à-vis
one another. Life’s irreducibility to things non-living would be a special
instance of this general non-reducible self-standingness operative
throughout the strata of both Natur und Geist.70
Like Schelling, Hegel, as has been voluminously documented, draws
ample inspiration from Kant’s theorization of the notion of life in the
Critique of Judgment.71 In fact, consistent with a persistent modus
operandi steering his extended engagements with Kantianism, Hegel
ontologizes the Kantian concept of the organic as per the third Critique,
a concept Kant leaves in the ontological limbo of the critical-regulative
“as if” (als ob) (HTM 9). As characteristic of real material being over-
and-above the restricted status of a pale, deontologized idea confined to
the shadow-theater of the thinking subject’s mind alone, Hegel’s post-
Kantian conception of organic life exhibits several features. Prior to a
summary of those features, it’s worth noting that the Phenomenology’s
discussion of observing reason moves from charting the intra-scientific
emergence and escape from mechanics and physics of the idea of
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organic life in general to narrating the genesis of the concept of human

life (as active, conscious, free-willed agency) in particular. The latter
occasions observing reason’s botched attempts to formulate, in the woe-
fully deficient language of non-speculative understanding (Verstand)
and its mechanistic, non-dialectical materialisms, a scientific account of
itself in its very subjectivity. The three-part sequence of ([pseudo-]sci-
entific) psychology, physiognomy, and phrenology results from observ-
ing reason’s observation of itself, a reflexive turn it requires of itself (in
order to live up to its own standards of scientificity) but by which it
subverts itself, pushing itself into carrying out an auto-undermining
self-sublation.
The first flaw Hegel diagnoses as fatal to the efforts of the modern
sciences to handle life generally and human life specifically has to do
with their strictly descriptive nature. As he correctly indicates, moder-
nity’s scientificity foregoes the “ought” of prescription and restricts
itself exclusively to the “is” of description. Put in fitting Aristotelian
parlance, questions concerning final causality (“Why?”) are ruled out
as unscientific, with only the “How?” questions of efficient causality
being viewed as valid and legitimate explanatory concerns for the sci-
ences (for example, Newtonian physics strives to explain how gravity
works, but not why there is gravity in the first place). For reasons very
different from those that prompt Leibniz before him similarly to com-
plain of the absence of final causality in secular science (i.e., “physics”),
Hegel argues that this circumscribed description of efficient causes
alone renders modern science (as epitomized by Newtonian physics)
deeply and inherently unsatisfying, at least when it comes to grasping
life and subjectivity appropriately. His argument is that living crea-
tures, animated by desires and the like, are perpetually self-surpassing
beings. Rather than being “inert” (as are the non-living materials stud-
ied by mechanics and physics), these entities actually live their lives
teleologically, with their concrete cognition and comportment continu-
ally being shaped and steered by aims, ends, and goals (i.e., final
causes as, in the locution of post-Hegelian existential phenomenology,
projects in and through which living actors project themselves into
futures beyond themselves via plans and purposes). Efficient causality
alone might suffice for mere matter in motion, but, for living organisms
that really are in and for themselves teleologically future oriented, this
teleology-free form of description (for instance, mechanical materialism)
leaves out of its picture an essential dimension of the real being of liv-
ing beings making them what they were, are, and will be.72 Therefore,
as Terry Pinkard clarifies, “Because organisms require these teleological
functionalist explanations, which are completely out of place in the phys-
ical explanation of inorganic nature, it follows for Hegel that biology
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must be a science separate from that of physics.”73 Likewise, Daniel

Dahlstrom, speaking of certain lowest common denominators holding
between Kant’s and Hegel’s ideas of life, hypothesizes that the teleolog-
ical and functionalist features of these conceptions entails “the thesis of
biology’s autonomy with respect to physics.”74
Along these same lines, Hegel sees in observing reason an overriding
preference for analytically decomposing the wholes of its objects of
inquiry into fixed, stable parts. When applied to life, the outcome, as
assessed from Hegel’s Kant-inspired standpoint on these matters, is a
travesty in which the living is reduced to the dead. Ontologically follow-
ing in Kant’s critical-epistemological footsteps, Hegel conceives of
organic lives as intrinsically involving dynamic processes teleologically
self-organized in coherent wholes greater than the sum of their inher-
ently interrelated parts qua organs (hence being resistant to analytic
decomposition). The observing gaze of modern scientific reason morti-
fies and petrifies organisms when it falls upon them, boiling down liv-
ing unities, with their irreducible inner integrities, to lifeless jumbled
aggregates of inanimate mechanical bits and pieces externally juxta-
posed with each other side by side (PS 262, 269, 276).
According to Hegel, organisms enjoy the enclosure of an auto-reflex-
ivity and partial self-sufficiency vis-à-vis their physical environments
and material surroundings (PS 279–80, 284). This means that non-
human life exhibits a proto-freedom, a Hegelian genuine/non-spurious
“infinity” as autonomously determining independent relation to self,
preceding and anticipating the full-fledged freedom of human life. As
will be even more apparent in the Encyclopedia the focus of section five
below, Hegel simultaneously acknowledges that the living arise out of
the non-living (i.e., organic constellations are generated out of non-
organic ones subsisting on the strata of mechanics and physics) as well
as insists that life is irreducible, both epistemologically and ontologi-
cally, to non-life. Therefore, my identification of him as a grandfather of
the anti-reductionist paradigm of strong emergentism in the recent life
sciences is hardly without its justifications.75
Herein, I won’t delve into the details of Hegel’s recounting of the
comedy of errors of observing reason’s farcical, ham-fisted stabs at get-
ting to grips with itself through psychology, physiognomy, and phrenol-
ogy. Others before me have executed these exegeses admirably, making
another such exercise by me in this context redundant. Instead, I want
to bring this section on the Phenomenology to a close by putting under
the magnifying glass a remark occurring just before Hegel’s turn to the
moment when scientific reason begins trying to account for itself qua
minded human life. For those defenders of Hegel who nonetheless
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accept the truth of the Darwin-event (to speak like Badiou), this state-
ment is bound to provoke a feeling of shame—“organic Nature has no
history [die organische Natur hat keine Geschichte]” (PS 295).
Admittedly, this comment indeed is part and parcel of Hegel’s staunch,
unbudging refusal to countenance anything in the vein of natural his-
tory and evolutionary theory. However, that aside, I intend to add the
twist of a supplementary interpretive caveat to this claim by Hegel, one
entirely consistent with Hegel’s position as outlined thus far: Organic
Nature (with Nature being different from Spirit) has no history—save
for (spiritual) history itself as self-denaturalized nature-become-second-
nature. If, for Hegel, historical second nature (as more than material
Geist) immanently emerges out of natural first nature (as material
Natur), then one could say in Hegelian style, the distinction between
non-historical Nature and historical Spirit is a distinction internal to
Nature itself. In other words, and to be more precise, insofar as natural
substance is vulnerable to sundering itself unintentionally in ways
such that it accidentally engenders human subjects (and living organ-
isms as a class), geistige Geschichte is an identity in difference with
respect to the kingdom of nature. Spiritual history, which for Hegel is
history strictly speaking, can be depicted as (self-)historicized nature
qua the procession of more than natural historical subjects springing
up and out of the matter of not-fully-historical natural substance
(which is, again, a substance prone to denaturlizing itself). I contend
that this reading is fundamentally faithful to a program Hegel
announces already during his early years in Bern and carries forward
up through the Phenomenology while in Jena. What’s more, I am con-
vinced that close scrutiny of Hegel’s post-Phenomenology system in
light of the preceding sketch of his youthful work, which I will under-
take in the next two sections, substantiates my recruiting of Hegel as a
towering philosophical forerunner of transcendental materialism.
4. Real Genesis—From the Natural to the Logical, and Back Again
Any thorough assessment of Hegel’s mature system cannot avoid a

reckoning with that heart and soul of his thinking he identifies as
“logic” (Logik). Given both the formidable, sprawling complexity of the
Hegelian logical apparatus as well as my guiding, overriding concern
with his Realphilosophie (i.e., the philosophies of nature and mind/spirit
[Geist] as distinct from logic), an extended engagement with this part of
his philosophy isn’t fitting in the current setting. Nonetheless, my
struggle to revivify his oft-rubbished Naturphilosophie requires, at a
minimum, that I address the manners in which Hegel concludes the
different textual elaborations of his systematic logic—and this because
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these multiple articulations all end with descriptions of the leap from
the logic to the philosophy of nature (as per the organizing division of
the three-volume Encyclopedia into the Logic, Philosophy of Nature,
and Philosophy of Mind). Related to this, the question of whether
Hegel’s real philosophy is really “real” in the sense of being truly realist
and materialist, rather than being (as so often charged) macro-solipsist
qua panlogicist, can and should be answered on the basis of a close,
careful reading of the final paragraphs of his logics.
I wish to get underway at this juncture with an analysis of the last
paragraph of Hegel’s 1804–1805 Logic and Metaphysics, itself a compo-
nent of the Jenaer Systementwürfe (with this paragraph to be examined
comparatively in relation to immediately subsequent analyses of the
closings of the Science of Logic [1812–1816], the Encyclopedia Logic
[1817, 1827, 1830], and the Berlin Lectures on Logic [1831]). Therein,
Hegel wraps up his sketch of the “Absolute Spirit” (der absolute Geist)
of the “Metaphysics of Subjectivity” (Metaphysik der Subjektivität)
thus:
The idea of spirit [Die Idee des Geistes], or spirit that intuits itself
in other(ness) as itself, is immediately again spirit connecting with
itself as absolute spirit. In other words, it is absolute spirit as infin-
ity and, for its self-cognizing (or the becoming itself out of its
other[ness]), the other of itself. It is nature; the simple absolute
spirit connecting with itself is ether [Äther], absolute matter [die
absolute Materie]. Spirit, having found itself in its other, is self-
enclosed and living nature [selbst geschlossene und lebendige
Natur]. As spirit that is at the same time connecting with itself,
nature is other(ness), spirit as infinite, and the coming to be of
absolute spirit. Nature is the first moment of self-realizing spirit
[Sie ist das erste Moment des sich realisierenden Geistes].76
Especially in light of its very last sentence, this paragraph undeniably

stipulates that lone natural substance (as actual, objective materiality)
is the sole initial ground (i.e., “the first moment”) preceding the genesis
within and out of itself of thereafter transcendent (qua auto-reflec-
tively/reflexively-relating) spiritual subjectivity in its more than natu-
ral autonomy (i.e., “Spirit . . . is self-enclosed and living nature”). Spirit
emerges from Nature and goes on to enjoy a self-determining freedom
relative to this material Grund—and this while nonetheless continuing
to remain immanent to physical, substantial being (albeit in the form of
a peculiar second nature as a transcendence-in-immanence). Prior to
the Encyclopedia, the young Hegel begins outlining the contours of
what Murray Greene, in his path-breaking 1972 study of the still rela-
tively neglected philosophical anthropology launching the Philosophy
of Mind on the heels of the Philosophy of Nature, accurately portrays as
a “liberation struggle” (Befreiungskampf),77 a war waged internal to
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conflicted, contingency-ridden weak nature and eventuating in the

breaking-out of subjectivity as a separate trajectory of natural denatu-
ralization. This battle of Geist with Natur is fought out not only on the
plane of theoretical knowledge, but also on the soil of practical activity
too (as Hegel’s proto-Marxist musings on work, the processes of human
labor, conveys quite clearly).78
Already during the phase of the Jenaer Systementwürfe, the term
“idea” (Idee), as employed in the quotation above, is defined in line with
absolute (and not subjective) idealism. That is to say, in this time of col-
laboration with Schelling, the Hegelian idea is an instance of the iden-
tity of identity and difference; more precisely, the (absolute) idea
encompasses both itself and its other (i.e., the non-idea as pre-
ideal/extra-ideational) (DFS 112; FK 59–60, 113). In the passage quoted
in the preceding paragraph, Hegel associates the idea in this sense
with infinity (as he also does in the sixth thesis of the twelve Latin
Habilitationsthesen opening his 1801 “Philosophical Dissertation on the
Orbits of the Planets”—“The idea is synthesis of the infinite and the
finite, and the whole of philosophy consists in ideas [Idea est synthesis
infiniti et finiti et philosophia omnis est in ideis]”79). And, Hegel’s
Spinoza-derived speculations on the infinite, which come to the fore
while he’s in Jena and remain thereafter central to his mature philo-
sophical outlook,80 provide the paradigmatic example epitomizing what
he and Schelling have in mind as regards the identity of identity and
difference. Spinoza discerns a mutual-exclusivity between two concepts
usually (and inconsistently) predicated of God both at once: infinitude
and transcendence. From Spinoza’s perspective, the very idea of infin-
ity entails that anything infinite cannot be situated over-and-above
(i.e., in transcendence of) things finite. If the infinite were to be tran-
scendent (as separate and distinct) from the finite, then it wouldn’t be
truly infinite because the finite would remain outside of it. In other
words, equating the infinite with the transcendent entails self-contra-
dictorily rendering the infinite itself finite by limiting it through the
move of placing the realm of the finite in a domain external to the thus-
circumscribed domain of the infinite. This amounts to de-infinitizing
the infinite, namely, rendering it less than infinite insofar as it isn’t all-
encompassing in being bounded/demarcated through a Verstand-vari-
ety inflexible, either/or binary opposition to the finite as mislocated on
a thither side beyond the (specious/spurious) “infinite.” As per the spec-
ulative, Vernunft-level logic of the Hegelian-Schellingian Absolute of
the Jena years—this logic overcomes the strictures of bivalence pre-
venting the understanding from being able to conceive infinity in its
real essence—the genuine infinite is the identity of the infinite and the
finite (just as, for Spinoza, the only authentically infinite God is an
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immanent, rather than a transcendent one). Put differently, the infinite

encompasses itself and its other(s).
Earlier on in the 1804–1805 Logic and Metaphysics, Hegel addresses
the topic of infinity. Cognizant of standing in the shadow of Spinoza, he
argues:
Genuine infinity . . . is not a series that always has its completion
in some other yet always has this other outside itself. Rather, the
other is in the determinate itself; it is a contradiction, absolute on
its own account: and this is the true essence of the determinacy. In
other words, [it is] not [the case] that a term of the antithesis is on
its own account, but that it only is within its opposite or that only
the absolute antithesis is, while the opposite, since it only is within
its opposite, annihilates itself therein, and annihilates this other as
much as itself. The absolute antithesis, infinity, is this absolute
reflection into itself of the determinate that is an other than itself
(that is, not an other in general against which it would be indiffer-
ent on its own account, but its immediate contrary), and as that, it
is itself. This alone is the true nature of the finite: that it is infinite,
that it sublates itself in its being. The determinate has as such no
other essence than this absolute unrest: not to be what it is [Das
Bestimmte als solches hat kein anderes Wesen als diese absolute
Unruhe, nicht zu sein, was es ist]. (TJS 35; JS 32–3)
The disquieting restlessness of which Hegel speaks is a power of nega-

tivity flowing in two directions simultaneously: as described in this quo-
tation, moving from the finite to the infinite via the self-sublation of
finitude (i.e., the Spinozistic becoming-infinite of the finite); and, as
described in countless guises elsewhere, moving from the infinite to the
finite via the self-sublation of infinitude (i.e., the post-Spinozistic
[because allegedly unexplained by Spinoza (LHP 3:263–4, 268–9, 285,
287)] becoming-finite of the infinite, à la substance becoming subject
[TJS 85]). The Hegelian infinite is infinite only (and paradoxically)
insofar as it also is finite qua not entirely infinite; the same holds for
the finite, as testified to in the remarks immediately above. Hegel’s
speculative treatment of infinity can be seen as of a piece with his
dialectical ontology, an ontology neither metaphysically realist nor
nominalist and in which universality (like the infinite) and particular-
ity (like the finite) pass over into each other through and within the
real being(s) of neither wholly universal, nor completely particular indi-
viduality/singularity.81
Returning to the closing paragraph of the 1804–1805 Logic and
Metaphysics, Geist as infinite idea in its absoluteness preserves Nature
(i.e., Spirit’s other) in its independent alterity/difference while nonethe-
less overcoming this otherness. Spirit, as per absolute idealism, is the
accomplishment of this overcoming (Aufhebung) in that it arrives at
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self-conscious recognition of the structural isomorphisms between the

interrelated parallel, yet distinct logics of, on the one hand, the objec-
tivity of natural substance, and, on the other hand, itself as the subjec-
tivity of spirituality/mind. Geist arises from Natur. It thereafter eventu-
ally achieves a comprehension in which Nature remains self-stand-
ing/sufficient without, for all that, being insurmountably alien, left as a
foreign, enigmatic “x,” a mysterious, unfathomable depth.
I turn now to the conclusion of Hegel’s Science of Logic. To cut right
to the chase, here, quoted at length, is the final paragraph of that hulk-
ing tome:
The idea [die Idee] . . . in positing itself as absolute unity of the
pure Notion [des reinen Begriffs] and its reality and thus contract-
ing itself into the immediacy of being, is the totality in this form—
nature. But this determination has not issued from a process of
becoming, nor is it a transition [Diese Bestimmung ist aber nicht
ein Gewordensein und Übergang]. . . . On the contrary, the pure
Idea in which the determinateness or reality of the Notion is itself
raised into Notion, is an absolute liberation [absolute Befreiung] for
which there is no longer any immediate determination that is not
equally posited [gesetzt] and itself Notion; in this freedom, there-
fore, no transition [Übergang] takes place; the simple being to
which the Idea determines itself remains perfectly transparent to it
and is the Notion that, in its determination, abides with itself. The
passage is therefore to be understood here rather in this manner,
that the Idea freely releases [frei entläßt] itself in its absolute self-
assurance and inner poise. By reason of this freedom, the form of
its determinateness is also utterly free—the externality of space
and time existing absolutely on its own account without the moment
of subjectivity [die absolute für sich selbst ohne Subjektivität seiende
Äußerlichkeit des Raums und der Zeit]. In so far as this externality
presents itself only in the abstract immediacy of being and is appre-
hended from the standpoint of consciousness, it exists as mere
objectivity and external life [äußerliches Leben]; but in the Idea it
remains essentially and actually [an und für sich] the totality of
the Notion, and science in the relationship to nature of divine cog-
nition. But in this next resolve of the pure Idea to determine itself
as external Idea, it thereby only posits for itself the mediation out
of which the Notion ascends as a free Existence that has with-
drawn into itself from externality, that completes its self-liberation
in the science of spirit, and that finds the supreme Notion of itself
in the science of logic as the self-comprehending pure Notion.82
Several facets of this paragraph warrant highlighting. To begin with,

Hegel palpably is at pains to stress that the shift from logic to real phi-
losophy, philosophy of nature being the indispensable first half of the
latter, is not a “process of becoming” (Gewordensein) or a “transition”
(Übergang). That is to say, the move from the logical to the natural is
not a sequential moment of a linear development unfolding over the
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course of time. In fact, if anything, plenty of evidence scattered

throughout Hegel’s corpus (for instance, as seen previously, the last
sentence of the Jena Logic and Metaphysics) testifies to the contrary:
Whereas the “Absolute Idea” as “pure Notion” is crowned with a sort of
atemporal logical priority over nature, brute nature, in its free-stand-
ing, objective existence (i.e., sans all spiritual subjectivity, including
that of the realized ideational/notional für sich), enjoys a chronological-
genetic priority over Spirit (this priority in time of Natur over Geist
also is on display across the full arc of the real-philosophical compo-
nents of the Encyclopedia as elaborated in its second and third vol-
umes) (HTM 33). In other words, Hegel makes clear here that, having
finished with the laborious task of assembling the massive nucleus of
his mature system, he is not now going to go into the business of telling
tall theological tales of cosmic creation ex nihilo, that is, stories about
the mysterious emanation of real, embodied Natur und Geist from the
misty, ethereal vapors of a metaphysical God, an ageless conceptuality
eternally preceding and magically producing out of itself the actual uni-
verse.
In connection with the preceding, Hegel undeniably grants in this
passage that nature, in its determinate given being, retains its self-suf-
ficient status as a reality unto itself apart from any and every subject.
Again, he straightforwardly speaks of “the externality of space and time
existing absolutely on its own account without the moment of subjectiv-
ity” and “mere objectivity and external life.” Although natural sub-
stance becomes spiritual subjectivity, the former, in its ontological inde-
pendence, pre-exists the latter.
Additionally, Hegel herein refers to the “liberation” (Befreiung) of
ideational/notional subjectivity. The resonance with Greene’s earlier-
mentioned depiction of the emergence through a “liberation struggle” of
specifically human life out of nature, as itself culminating in organic
life, is fortuitous (I’m referring to his unpacking of Hegel’s philosophical
anthropology, which forms the first stretch of the Philosophy of Mind).
In what sense? The third volume of the Encyclopedia draws to a close
around the same set of themes and protagonists as the Science of Logic.
However, the ideational/notional subject an und für sich, as philosophi-
cal consciousness proper, now appears in the light of a context in which
its real (as distinct from exclusively logical) genesis looms in the back-
ground in the form of the laid-out contents of the philosophies of nature
and mind/spirit. In one of the final paragraphs (¶574) of this last vol-
ume of the Encyclopedia trilogy, Hegel states,
This notion of philosophy is the self-thinking Idea, the truth aware
of itself (Section 236)—the logical system, but with the significa-
tion that it is universality approved and certified in concrete con-
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tent as in its actuality. In this way the science has gone back to its
beginning [Dieser Begriff der Philosophie ist die sich denkende
Idee, die wissende Wahrheit (236), das Logische mit der Bedeutung,
daß es die im konkreten Inhalte als in seiner Wirklichkeit bewährte
Allgemeinheit ist. Die Wissenschaft ist auf diese Weise in ihren
Anfang zurückgegangen]. (PM 574)
The second of these two sentences goes together with the cross-refer-
ence contained in the first sentence. ¶23 opens the concluding section of
the Logic on “The Absolute Idea” (Die absolute Idee).83 The Science of
Logic and Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel claims in ¶574, go from being
empty to full starting-points only after the real-philosophical (i.e.,
more/less-than-logical) genesis of spiritual subjectivity out of natural
substance has run its complete cycle, thereby providing the post facto
“approval” and “certification” of “the logical system” so that it is
endowed with the “actuality” of “concrete content.” Temporally speak-
ing, the logical acts on the natural (and the more/less-than-logical
“real” overall) solely in the mode of retroaction (à la Freud’s
Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s après-coup). The logical definitely doesn’t
relate to the real in the guise of a supernatural source, an unmoved
Prime Mover, transcendently setting in motion the sequential trajec-
tory of a progressive, stage-organized gestation and birthing of a thus-
conceived real(ity). As T.S. Eliot later phrases it, this is a matter of
“arriv[ing] where we started” so as to “know the place for the first
time”:84 The ideational/notional spirituality of subjectivity can and does
circumnavigate back to its origins in asubjective natural substance;
armed with the benefit of its absolute idealist hindsight, this subject
now is able to “know” (its) substance “for the first time,” with knowl-
edge here amounting to Geist’s recognitional identification of sameness-
in-difference (as per the speculative axiom concerning the identity of
identity and difference) vis-à-vis Natur and its structural isomorphisms
mirroring and mirrored by Geist.
Before glossing the closing paragraphs of the Encyclopedia Logic and
the Berlin Lectures on Logic with comparative succinctness, one fur-
ther note sounded at the end of the Science of Logic cries out to be
noticed. Therein, by way of a reminder, Hegel, on the heels of warning
that the shift from the logical to the natural isn’t a movement in (lin-
ear-chronological) time, specifies, “the Idea freely releases itself in its
absolute self-assurance and inner poise. By reason of this freedom, the
form of its determinateness is also utterly free.”85 The insistence on the
abiding, uncompromised independence of objective space, time, and life
(i.e., the incarnations of “determinateness” as “utterly free”) immedi-
ately follows. How should these lines be read?
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The reading of the concluding paragraph of the Science of Logic I

intend to advance at this juncture—I consider this interpretation as
holding good for the conclusions of the other logics too—relies on this
motif of the Idea’s “freedom.” What does Hegel mean by this type of
talk? Absolute Spirit is “infinite”86 precisely as per the Hegelian mean-
ing of being autonomously self-relating, spinning on the axis of its own
free determination of itself (whereas whatever is finite is heteronomous,
determined from outside of itself by an other or others around which it
orbits as a satellite). Put otherwise, it’s not infinite as immortally inter-
minable and/or cosmically all-englobing (for Hegel, spatio-temporal con-
struals of infinity count as bad/spurious instances of non/pre-philosoph-
ical picture-thinking).87 In qualifying logically self unfolded Geist as
infinite in this exact sense, Hegel indicates that it doesn’t simply
encompass and digest without remainder non-logical, extra-spiritual
being(s), such as the things of Nature—and this contra the tattered
textbook picture of the Hegelian system as panlogicist, as radically,
rabidly idealist qua anti-realist. Returning once more to the exact
wording of the Science of Logic, maximally actualized, concept-monger-
ing subjectivity, in “freely releasing” itself from natural substance, also
and at the same time leaves Nature as objective reality to the liberty of
revolving around its own, subject-free center(s) of gravity (again, “By
reason of this [Spirit’s] freedom, the form of its determinateness [i.e.,
Nature] is also utterly free”). However, the absolute idealist subject has
won in principle unrestricted epistemological access to the external
worlds of the natural and the material in their subsisting, enduring
ontological independence from them.
The Encyclopedia Logic’s final paragraph and its accompanying
Zusatz lend support to my reconstruction of the ending of the Science of
Logic. Hegel once again emphasizes that his idealist logic doesn’t
deprive nature of its free-standing objective status, but, on the con-
trary, “releases” it unto its liberated self (as its self-standing):
Considered according to this unity that it has with itself, the Idea
that is for itself is intuiting and the intuiting Idea is Nature. But as
intuiting, the Idea is posited in the one-sided determination of
immediacy or negation, through external reflection. The absolute
freedom [Die absolute Freiheit] of the Idea, however, is that it does
not merely pass over [übergeht] into life, nor that it lets life shine
[scheinen] within itself as finite cognition, but that, in the absolute
truth of itself, it resolves to release out of itself [entschließt] into
freedom the moment of its particularity or of the initial determin-
ing and otherness, [i.e.,] the immediate Idea as its reflexion, or
itself as Nature.88
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The Zusatz remarks:

We have now returned to the Concept of the Idea [Begriff der Idee]
with which we began. At the same time this return to the begin-
ning [Anfang] is an advance. What we began with was being,
abstract being, while now we have the Idea as being; and this Idea
that is, is Nature.89
In addition to echoing the Science of Logic’s stipulations that the shift

from logic to the real philosophy of nature is not a temporal develop-
ment (i.e., a “transition” [Übergang] or, as immediately above, a “pass-
ing over” [Übergehen]), Hegel adds here several more specifications.
Building on my prior commentary, I read these passages as laying
down a narrative according to which, in the beginning (Anfang), Nature
is a substance sundering itself into itself and Spirit as its Other. As
already argued, for Hegel, natural, material substance precedes spiri-
tual, more than material subjectivity in time, enjoying a diachronic-
genetic (although not logical) priority. Likewise, in this Zusatz, Nature
unambiguously is posited/presupposed as the real and properly con-
ceived beginning. The Zusatz goes so far as to suggest, through its itali-
cizations, that Nature fundamentally is the “is” of “being.” In place of
what I am tempted to label the “false start” of the mature Hegelian
logics with pure being in its abstraction (i.e., the initial felix culpa lead-
ing through “nothing” to “becoming” and the flowering wealth of ever
more concrete determinations), the backward glance of the philosophi-
cal consciousness having reached the climactic peak of the encyclopedic
system can see and recognize its true ground of departure as really
being Nature (albeit Nature now “as Idea,” namely as knowable qua
not irretrievably withdrawn and essentially alien to ideational agents).
In the same vein, I construe the first couple of sentences of the first of
these two quotations as making two interrelated claims: First, the
intra-ideationally unified, coherent Idea for itself (as fully realized
Spirit) is the torsion of an immanent reflective/reflexive twist of Nature
(“Considered according to this unity that it has with itself, the Idea that
is for itself is intuiting and the intuiting Idea is Nature”); second, this
internal (self-)contorting of Nature introduces within it a fissure or split
(as Žižek would say, a “parallax gap”) between the two sides of itself
qua immediate being and its estranged spiritual Other qua the mediat-
ing negativity of thinking, each side having been expelled into external-
ity vis-à-vis the other (“But as intuiting, the Idea is posited in the one-
sided determination of immediacy or negation, through external reflec-
tion”).
I interpret the third and last long sentence of ¶244 of the
Encyclopedia as indicating a number of connected things. To begin
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with, the self-sundering of Nature into itself and Geist animates a tra-
jectory along which Spirit, it its Befreiungskampf, strives and strains to
release itself, in its proto-forms, from its material ground(s). Then, if
and when nascent, germinal spiritual subjectivity achieves autonomy
for itself by establishing auto-determining, self-relating dynamics
through its conceptually mediated activities (as a transcendent-while-
immanent kinetics), this liberation of itself is simultaneously a freeing
of its Other, a liberation of natural substance co-emergent with the
emergence of this free subject. Moreover, Hegel seems to stipulate that
none of this is to be taken and dismissed as a matter of mere appear-
ances (as hinted by his use of “scheinen”). In other words, this self-divi-
sion of natural substance into Natur und Geist has a genuine ontologi-
cal weight such that neither dimension of the division can be written
off lightly as epiphenomenal.
Right before his death, Hegel provides one more rearticulation of the
rapport between his logical framework and Naturphilosophie. His 1831
Lectures on Logic are concluded as follows:
The absolute idea is the Word [JÏdlt], Christ [(das) Wort] that
releases itself freely [sich frei entläßt] from itself into nature. The
absolute idea does not simply pass within nature over into life [sie
geht nicht nur über in das Leben], but has resolved to freely release
itself from itself as nature [sondern sie entschließt sich, sich frei als
Natur zu entlassen]. Nature is then what is immediate, it is being—
except that this content of the consummated absolute idea [die vol-
lendete Idee] has being displaced outside itself. But nature itself, as
we have already seen to be anticipated in the purely logical cate-
gory of life, is its own rise up beyond itself into spirit. Nature thus
bears upon itself the mark of its own self-nullification, and passes
over [überzugehen] into infinite spirit as the truth of nature. Yet it
does not do so without first passing over into finite spirit [endlichen
Geist], which only then will lift itself into infinite spirit [unendlichen
Geist].90
Being turns out to be nature (i.e., material substance as based on such

objective externalities as space, time, and life).91 Furthermore, the
intra-logical genesis of the distinction between spiritual Self and natu-
ral Other (as a distinction internal to spiritual Self itself) is a genetic
outgrowth of the real genesis of Spirit out of Nature, with this quota-
tion visibly juxtaposing and weaving together real and logical geneses.
In terms of real genesis, in which nature (unlike the ideational/notional)
actually “passes over” (überzugehen) into finite and infinite spirit(s), the
natural self-subversively denaturalizes itself, lifts itself up by its own
bootstraps, and thereby splits off a part of itself as Geist (“nature itself .
. . is its own rise up beyond itself into spirit”). Such are Hegel’s last
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remaining words on the complex relations between the logical and the
real.
5. The Dialectics of Impotent Nature—Substance and Subject

in the System of the Mature Hegel
In the prior quotation from the end of the Berlin Lectures on Logic,
Hegel observes, “Nature . . . bears upon itself the mark of its own self-
nullification.” (In the Encyclopedia, when addressing the transition
from the philosophy of nature to the philosophy of spirit, he similarly
underlines nature’s tendency toward being auto-negating and self-sun-
dering/sublating, prone to splitting itself into itself and its Other as
Spirit.92) I read this 1831 remark as related to what Hegel repeatedly,
in previous works, designates as the “impotence” or “weakness”
(Ohnmacht) of nature.93 Additionally, this absence or lack of power at
the level of the natural has everything to do with the role of the modal-
ity of contingency in the Hegelian system. Hence, before zooming in on
the concept-theme of weak nature in Hegel’s œuvre, I must pause in
order briefly to address his relationship to the contingent.
Exhaustively surveying the place of contingency in Hegelian philoso-
phy would be a book-length endeavor unto itself (and, in some cases,
such as studies by Bernard Mabille and John Burbidge, has been).
What’s more, given the popular, propagandistic caricature of Hegel as a
totalizing thinker dictating the imprisonment of all reality in a
cramped, cold cage of a priori logical-metaphysical necessity, queries
regarding the status of the contingent in his thought touch upon princi-
pal fault lines of tension running through the entire, sizable history of
the intricate and complicated interpretive reception of Hegelianism.
Suffice it to say that, however debatable, I, along with Ži ž ek, 94
Malabou,95 and Lebrun96 (among others), grant contingency an abso-
lutely crucial core standing within the spheres constituting regions of
the sprawling Hegelian system.
So as not to risk losing focus, I will dwell almost exclusively on the con-
tingent as it features in those portions of Hegel’s apparatus directly rele-
vant to my endeavor to resurrect his Naturphilosophie. Circumnavigating
back to the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit on “Reason” is a good
way to start. As I explained earlier apropos this section, Hegel, sticking
to his hands-off phenomenological procedure of letting the non-philo-
sophical figures/shapes of consciousness spontaneously unfold them-
selves and deploy their resources without the philosopher’s external
interference (PS 27–8, 53, 58–9, 77–88, narratively “re-collects” what
happens as the worldview of modern secular science, left to its own
devices, internally gives rise out of itself to the concept of life—a notion
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exceeding the confines of Baconian-Galilean scientificity, an idea to

which such an early-modern Weltanschauung cannot do real justice.
Given Hegel’s functionalist conception of the organic, based on an ontol-
ogization of Kant’s teleological treatment of life, the physics-centered
mechanistic outlook of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science is
precluded from being able to provide a satisfactory account of the liv-
ing.
Another important facet of the Phenomenology’s testimony concern-
ing the inadequacy of “bump and grind” corpuscular/mechanical mate-
rialism vis-à-vis the phenomena characteristic of organic life, a facet I
didn’t touch on before, has to do with contingency. Obviously, the
notion of non-contingent law (qua laws of efficient causality) is utterly
central to the natural sciences of modernity.97 Succinctly stated, for
Hegel, neither human nor non-human forms of life can be captured as
conforming to the rigid regularity of the cause and effect patterns pur-
portedly controlling the mechanical and physical realms of inorganic
nature. In the narrative of the Phenomenology, a contributing factor to
the intra-scientific, self-wrought ruin of scientific definitions/theoriza-
tions of life (as per seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criteria for sci-
entificity) is reason’s repeated attempt to reduce the dynamics of the
living to instantiations of necessary laws. Not only does observing rea-
son seek in vain for fixed, law-like relations both between the (imag-
ined) inner and outer features of organisms (PS 262, 287), as well as
between organisms and their surrounding environments (PS 275)—the
swarm of contingencies affecting these relations spoil from the get-go
all efforts to discern reliable necessities therein—it falls into being a
ridiculous parody of itself when it pushes this pursuit into the domains
of the human. From Hume-inspired associationist psychologies to phys-
iognomy and phrenology, Hegel, the philosophical onlooker, bears wit-
ness to the absurd, laughable twists and turns by which scientific mod-
ern reason ties itself up into pretzel-like knots in its struggles to slap
the shackles of causal laws onto the living agency of autonomous
human subjectivity. Apart from the subject’s self-legislating rational
freedom, its baseline volitional nature already is capable of capricious
whims and fancies able to defy and bring to naught the superimposi-
tion of any and every scientistic rule upon it.98
The time finally has come to turn to the Realphilosophie of the
Encyclopedia. In these two volumes on Natur and Geist, Hegel, sub-
stantiating my glosses on the closings of the multiple versions of his
Logik, reminds his audience that he is neither anti-realist nor anti-
materialist. Skeptics doubting this likely would point to statements
such as, “An out-and-out Other [durchaus Anderes] simply does not
exist for mind” (PM 377Z) (a statement made in the Zusatz to the open-
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ing paragraph of the Philosophy of Mind). However, my earlier explica-

tions of Hegelian idealism indicate that “out-and-out” Otherness isn’t
equivalent to or coextensive with alterity überhaupt. Although Hegel’s
post-Kantian absolute idealism rules out anything akin to noumenal
things-in-themselves forever stubbornly subsisting as essentially and
in principle unknowable “x”s, this epistemological accessibility and
openness of mind’s Others doesn’t actually eliminate their ontological
Otherness as existing on their own independently of mental mediation.
Furthermore, in the same real-philosophical context of the Encyclo-
pedia, Hegel issues a number of pronouncements that glaringly fly in
the face of the portrait of him as a monistic idealist preaching a macro-
solipsism of a logical, metaphysical, immaterial Mind of cosmic, God-
like proportions from which lesser natural and human realities
emanate as lowly residual epiphenomena. In the Philosophy of Nature,
he maintains, “This idealism which recognizes the Idea throughout the
whole of Nature is at the same time realism” (PN 353) (and this
because structures and dynamics isomorphic to those at work in think-
ing Geist are really and autonomously at play in Natur). Then, at the
outset of the Philosophy of Mind, he insists several times that the natu-
ral is the “presupposition” (Voraussetzung) of free human mindedness,
that is, the temporally-antecedent material ground of being for all
beings, including human beings (PM 381, 384). Additionally, even
though mind, on Hegel’s encyclopedic telling, secures for itself a self-
determining autonomy vis-à-vis heteronomous nature (including the
biological body of the minded person), Hegel is careful to add the
nuance that this is a peculiar kind of transcendence remaining imma-
nent to the embodied beings of the physical world (PM 392) (as has
been clarified by Greene, DeVries, and Houlgate,99 among others).
Taken together with the mass of evidence I’ve already presented here,
these stipulations make the case against any association of Hegelianism
with spiritualist mysticisms and/or subjective idealisms very solid
indeed.
Prior to laying out my appropriation of the Hegelian concept-theme
of “weak nature,” with which I will close this discussion of his philoso-
phy, a few words of warning about Hegel’s relations with the sciences of
modernity are requisite. This is relatively well trodden ground; I’m far
from the first person to comment on this particular topic. With neither
the time, space, nor inclination to recapitulate others’ preceding schol-
arly investigations into the matter of Hegel and the sciences, I will
limit myself to a handful of blunt assertions. To begin with, Hegel is not
interested in philosophically annexing the territories of the a posteriori
sciences, usurping for the a priori their proper explanatory jurisdictions.
He is not motivated by an intellectually hubristic, grandiose, and, ulti-
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mately, doomed project to defend the crumbling throne of an aging, pre-

modern philosophical queen of the sciences in this sense.
In the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel distinguishes between
“truth” (Wahrheit) strictly speaking and mere bivalently right or wrong
correctness qua correspondence between a given proposition and a fac-
tual state-of-affairs (PS 39–41). As per his dictum in this same preface
according to which “The True is the whole [Das Wahre ist das Ganze]”
(PS 20), Hegel is concerned with accurately and illuminatingly situat-
ing the sciences in their broader non-scientific contexts, holistically
placing them in wider horizons that include historical, social, cultural,
political, economic, and religious features too. He seeks to comprehend
the many mutual cross-resonances rippling across the tangled, braided
expanses formed by these overlapping, intertwined, non-isolable
domains. This by no means involves a priori legislative interference by
philosophy with the passing of verdicts of correctness or incorrectness
on a posteriori scientific propositions arrived at via empirical observa-
tions and experiments (i.e., verdicts regarding correspondence as the
rightness or wrongness of fit between words and things). Hegel has no
intention of whimsically indulging himself in such presumptuous med-
dling. Rather, for him, the sciences, like any other figure/shape of con-
sciousness described in the Phenomenology, become self-subvertingly
false (in the sense of untrue qua one-sided) when they attempt to ele-
vate their partial worldview to being the truth of the whole. Valid for
producing correct claims within a restricted range of particular regions,
modern science tips over into invalidity once it overreaches itself by
stretching to cover everything under the sun. Nonetheless, this dialecti-
cal implosion into untenable lopsidedness leaves intact, within their
appropriate and narrowly well-defined registers, the veridical corre-
spondences already established as scientifically correct within the cir-
cumscribed spheres of the sciences themselves.
Of course, scientists then and now sometimes wander off into spon-
taneous speculations of their own regarding the more than scientific
dimensions surrounding their scientific activities. This fact alone would
justify someone like Hegel stepping in and insisting that these amateur
forays into areas of philosophical interest and concern be rendered
truly consequent and systematic by full-blooded speculative thinking
als Vernunft. That said, Hegel goes a step further along this line of
argumentation. As is already implicit in the Phenomenology’s charac-
terizations of observing reason (i.e., the post-Baconian, post-Galilean
Weltanschauung of modern secular science), the Philosophy of Nature
quite persuasively alleges that “physics” (i.e., the natural sciences) con-
tains much more metaphysics than it suspects or acknowledges (PN
245Z) (by Hegel’s estimation, even the most unsophisticated, flat-
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footed, naïve common sense is, unbeknownst to itself, suffused by the

mediation of highly intricate and complex logical and metaphysical net-
works—something demonstrated in detail within the pages of the
Phenomenology). Contra a crude empiricism appealing to raw sensory
givens, pure percepts undiluted by concepts, as the supposed alpha and
omega authorities underwriting the truths of the sciences—the opening
section of the Phenomenology (“Consciousness”) already exhibits the
self-defeating futility of such empiricism—Hegel, in a “remark” to §246
(in the introduction to the Philosophy of Nature), wryly notes, “if
physics were based solely on perceptions, and perceptions were nothing
more than the evidence of the senses, then the psychical act would con-
sist only in seeing, hearing, smelling, etc., and animals, too, would in
this way be physicists” (PN 246R).
The same section (§246) of the Encyclopedia contains an insistence
that philosophy is, in certain manners, dependent upon the a posteriori
sciences of nature—with this proposing the exact opposite of what
many critics of Hegelian Naturphilosophie allege this philosophy pro-
poses. Hegel states, “Not only must philosophy be in agreement with
our empirical knowledge of Nature, but the origin and formation of the
Philosophy of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by empirical
physics (die Entstehung und Bildung der philosophischen Wissenschaft
hat die empirische Physik zur Voraussetzung und Bedingung)” (PN
246). As Alison Stone brings to the fore in her 2005 study, Petrified
Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy, squaring this statement with
others by Hegel suggesting different relations between philosophy and
the sciences is a thorny matter.100 But, I disagree with her “strong
metaphysical a priori” fashion of negotiating these difficulties (arguably
advanced under the anachronistic impulse of her commitment to con-
temporary ecological green thinking). Instead, I lean more in the direc-
tion of favoring DeVries’ rendition according to which Hegel’s mature
encyclopedic system is stratified into a plethora of degrees of a posteri-
ori empirical sensitivity and a priori theoretical insensitivity, with
these strata themselves being reciprocally co-conditioning in (as should
be expected) dialectical ways (and, as also should be expected, Hegel
would be loathe to accept a Verstand-type black and white opposition
between the a priori and the a posteriori) (HTM 14, 20, 31, 33–4). The
important upshot at this moment is that a Hegelian approach to
Naturphilosophie is far from requiring or entailing an arrogant disre-
gard for philosophy’s non-philosophical conditions (such as the findings
of the sciences).
I now wish to zero in on the weakness of nature as described by
Hegel. This motif rarely is singled out for attention by commentators—
even by those few souls sympathetic to Hegel’s Naturphilosophie.
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Lacroix is an exception. In a chapter of his 1997 book on the Hegelian

philosophy of nature, a chapter entitled “The Impotence of Nature
[L’impuissance de la nature],” he concludes, “In a word: if nature is not
massive opacity but can be known, it is in the paradoxical movement by
which matter derealizes itself or idealizes itself at the same time as its
internal structure manifests itself as an elusive, shifty, transient limit
[limite fuyante].”101 I view this self-derealization/idealization of natural
matter as the resurfacing, in the register of the Encyclopedia’s real phi-
losophy of nature, of what the Phenomenology earlier gestures at in
terms of the process of substance becoming subject also. The ultimate
ontological condition of possibility for this dynamic of natural, material
substance morphing into denaturalized, more than material subjectiv-
ity is nature’s impotence/weakness (Ohnmacht).
With this additional reference back to the Phenomenology and the
young Hegel, I must take the opportunity to put in the spotlight a
Spinoza-inspired insight already surfacing in Hegel’s early writings, a
thesis central to the full sweep of his later texts too (including the
Encyclopedia). An exemplary and concise formulation of this realiza-
tion is to be found in the Phenomenology’s preface. Therein, he states,
“Reason [Vernunft] is . . . misunderstood when reflection [Reflexion] is
excluded from the True, and is not grasped as a positive moment of the
Absolute [als positives Moment des Absoluten] (PS 21).” In line with his
post-Spinozistic logic of the infinite (summarized earlier here), Hegel
basically is saying that the sentient and sapient subject is a self-reflec-
tive folding/doubling of substance back upon itself (with substance
being the self-differentiating “whole” [Ganzes] qua “True” [Wahres]), a
reflexive contorting twist internal to substantiality (and not outside it,
as the paradigmatic early modern dichotomy between the mutually
external couplet of subjective mind and objective world has it—a
dichotomy decisively deconstructed qua sublated in the Phenomenology)
(PS 803). If substantial being is, at its genetic base, “natural” material-
ity (to which evidence from Hegel’s corpus showcased above testifies),
then (self-)aware cognizing subjectivity is the exceptional point at
which being begins to think (itself), with this subject being simultane-
ously identical to and different from (its) substance (à la identity as the
identity of identity and difference-as-non-identity).
This guiding thread of Hegelian absolute idealism is pivotal for my
transcendental materialism insofar as the latter hinges on a theory of
the immanent natural, material genesis of the thereafter irreducibly
denaturalized, more than material autonomous subject free from
exhaustive heteronomous determination by what is, all the same, its
original rock-bottom ontological and ontogenetic ground(s). Parts of
natural substance become spiritual subjects; the Absolute, as material
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being (and as “absolute” to the extent that there’s no Elsewhere above

and beyond it), comes to be sentient and sapient. Hence, absolute ideal-
ism, with its idealism of the objective, also correlatively suggests a par-
allel materialism of the subjective, in that the more than material
thinking subject is an instance of the thinking of material being (in
both senses of the genitive). If, thanks to the structural isomorphisms I
regard as integral ingredients of Hegel’s far from anti-realist absolute
idealism, subjects can recognize the structures of their cognized con-
cepts and categories mirrored in their objects, then, I would claim, this
mirroring radiates in the other direction at the same time too: From the
vantage point of the Absolute, objects likewise hypothetically could rec-
ognize the structures of their inner logics and configurations mirrored in
their subjects. The objective as well as the subjective can say “You
resemble me!” in response to its Other. In this way, an objective materi-
alized realization of the subject corresponds to a subjective dematerial-
ized idealization of the object (the latter being the much more familiar
side of this coin for Hegel’s casual readers). The Hegelian idealism of
the object is the recto whose verso is a materialism of the subject.
Equipped with this comprehension of Hegelianism, I want to return
to the second and third volumes of the Encyclopedia. When, in the
Philosophy of Nature, Hegel characterizes nature as weak/impotent,
this is a fashion of emphasizing that the powers of the contingent reign
in the realms of the natural (PN 250, 370; HTM 187–9). In his chapter
on this topic, Lacroix helpfully clarifies, “The absolute idealism of Hegel
is not . . . the fantastical affirmation of an engendering of matter by
spirit, but that of the necessity for the latter to confront the former, up
to the extremity of the empirical, as being the condition of the realiza-
tion of its liberty.”102 My argument is that nature’s chaotic contingency,
reading “nature” as a Hegelian name for primordial being in the form
of the sole initial ground-as-groundless-ground (Grund-als-Ungrund),
is the necessary but not sufficient material/ontological condition of pos-
sibility for Geist, even in its freest, highest forms.
Related to his association of nature’s impotence with the potency of
contingency, Hegel adds that nature is shot through with antagonisms
and conflicts. The Philosophy of Nature equates the natural with “unre-
solved contradiction [der unaufgelöste Widerspruch]” (PN 248R).
Powers of negativity dwell within nature as originally a lone One at
odds with itself, a material plane of immanence pervaded by
cacophonous disharmony and violent clashes. In the introduction to the
Philosophy of History (another context in which the theme of the weak-
ness of nature features), Hegel proposes:
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Nature should not be rated too high nor too low . . . awakening con-
sciousness takes its rise surrounded by natural influences alone
[nur in der Natur], and every development of it is the reflection of
Spirit back upon itself in opposition to the immediate, unreflected
character of mere nature. Nature is therefore one element in this
antithetic abstracting process; Nature is the first standpoint from
which man can gain freedom within himself, and this liberation
must not [muß nicht] be rendered difficult by natural obstructions.
Nature, as contrasted with Spirit, is a quantitative mass, whose
power must not be so great as to make its single force omnipotent
[allmächtig].103
Much of this passage resonates with and lends further support to

exegetical claims put forward previously by me. What it clearly con-
tributes at the present juncture is testimony that, for Hegel himself,
the possibility of human beings as self-determining spiritual subjects is
tethered to the lack of potent necessities as would be sustained by
strife-free internal self-integration on the part of Natur. The contingent
ontological fact of nature’s contingency ridden nature is the ground-
zero facticity on the basis of which Geist itself comes to life and takes
shape. As Hegel elegantly puts it in his 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion, “Spiritual oneness comes forth out of severed being.”104
Since, for the moment, my transcendental materialist concerns
remain fixated upon the issue of human subjectivity, zooming in on this
with sharper, finer-grained resolution is necessary. First of all, in the
sub-section of the Philosophy of Nature on “The Animal Organism” (Der
tierische Organismus), Hegel, speaking of “the human organism” in
advance of the human-centric Philosophy of Mind, claims in a Zusatz
that “it is only in and from this type that we can ascertain and explain
the meaning of the undeveloped organism” (PN 352Z). Connoisseurs of
Marx almost certainly will recall the lines from the introductory section
of the Grundrisse asserting (with reference to comparative analyses of
political economies) that, “Human anatomy contains a key to the
anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the
subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the
higher development is already known.”105 What Hegel says here in
terms of the connections between human and non-human organisms
holds at a larger-scale level for his earlier-parsed presentations of the
rapport between the logical, the real, and their geneses. Exclusively
from the lofty logical heights of the fully-realized ideational conscious-
ness of completed systematic philosophy can the genetically prior enti-
ties and events, the temporally antecedent movements and combina-
tions, leading up to this pinnacle—these include natural beings as the
initial moments of this whole processual trajectory—be firmly and
appropriately grasped. Furthermore, this shared Hegelian-Marxian
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proposition can be read as licensing a retrojection of select traits of

human subjectivity back into its pre-existing, enabling bases, including
its non-human natural ones.
With the option of this retrojective move in mind, I would like to pro-
vide readers with a reminder of Hegel’s well-known intra-historical/spir-
itual narratives of the emergence of radically autonomous subjects. To
be extremely brief, in the Phenomenology (with the tableau of ancient
Greek Sittlichkeit laid out through an appropriation of Sophocles’
Antigone [PS 446–76]), the Philosophy of Right (with its core contrast
between Sittlichkeit and Moralität), and the Lectures on the History of
Philosophy (with its retelling of the trial and death of Socrates along
lines resembling the Phenomenology’s earlier rendition of Antigone
(LHP 1: 425–8), Hegel articulates and rearticulates a structural
dynamic in which the genuine infinity of autonomous subjectivity, in its
self-reflective/reflexive cutting off of itself from its background socio-
historical whole, comes to light for itself (für sich) only if and when this
whole from which it sunders itself via individuation begins to break
down and disintegrate. That is to say, for Hegel, disruptions and mal-
functionings of objective spirit are necessary (albeit not necessarily suf-
ficient) conditions for individuals to be hurled into their thus-opened
abysses of freedom. Only when objective spirit is weak, when it’s not
too strong and its sun is setting, is there the potential for the coming-
to-be-for-itself of the nocturnal void of Cogito-like subjectivity. The
introduction to The Philosophy of History speaks of circumstances of
“discordance” (Entzweiung) in the mÏift as “periods . . . which impel
the soul of nobler natures to seek refuge from the Present [Gegenwart]
in ideal regions [idealen Regionen].”106 Likewise, the Philosophy of Right
(with its Zusätze), gesturing at Hegel’s treatments elsewhere of
Socrates and the Stoics in this 1821 text’s elaboration of Moralität
(itself being a category linking the modern practical philosophy of
Kantian deontological ethics to these ancient references), observes,
“[o]nly in ages when the actual world is a hollow, spiritless, and unset-
tled existence [Existenz] may the individual be permitted to flee from
actuality and retreat into his inner life (innerliche Lebendigkeit).
Socrates made his appearance at the time when Athenian democracy
had fallen into ruin [Verderbens].”107
To jump right to my conclusion, which rests on the preceding
premises, I maintain that this structural dynamic operative between
the substance of Sittlichkeit and the subject of Moralität is not just
intra-spiritual: It recapitulates and reflects a process simultaneously
conjoining and disjoining (as the union of union and non-union à la the
1800 Frankfurt “Fragment of a System”) Natur und Geist. Expressed in
another way, the emergence of second nature (as the subjectivity of
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Geist) from first nature (as the substance of Natur) is repeated in modi-
fied form within second nature itself (in the mode of spiritual crises and
collapses at the level of Sittlichkeit catalyzing the birth of individuali-
ties contracted into the enclosures of their autonomous self-relations at
the level of Moralität). The logic of the weakness/impotence of nature is
refracted in different guises within the logic of the weakness/impotence
of objective spirit. Just as weak/impotent nature gives birth to Spirit
generally, weak/impotent objective spirit gives birth to an und für sich
subjective spirit. Playing with the happy accident of a fortuitous
homophony, Hegel indeed is a forerunner of Haeckel (PS 2).
Several other treatments of humanity in the Philosophy of Nature
now can be better appreciated. Explicitly echoing the Chorus’ “Ode to
Man” in Antigone, Hegel sings:
Whatever forces Nature develops and lets loose against man—cold,
wild beasts, water, fire—he knows means to counter them; indeed,
he takes these means from Nature and uses them against herself.
The cunning of his reason [die List seiner Vernunft] enables him to
preserve and maintain himself in the face of the forces of Nature,
by sheltering behind other products of Nature, and letting these
suffer her destructive attacks. Nature herself, however, in her uni-
versal [Allgemeinen] aspect, he cannot overcome in this way, nor
can he turn her to his own purposes. (PN 245)
As shown, human reason is a reflective power of negativity immanent

to being, material nature’s own self-distorting inflection, torsion, curv-
ing, or bending. Thus, the “cunning of his (man’s) reason” is an inner
permutation of the natural (dis)order itself, one of its own distinctive
swerves. What’s more, Hegel’s employment of the phrase “cunning of . .
. reason,” as in the (in)famous List der Vernunft, is important. In the
dimension of the spiritual history of humanity, the cunning of reason
can be interpreted as a higher-order, self-relating process, with its own
internally driving logical necessity, that arises in a bottom-up way
(some analytic philosophers would speak of supervenience here) from a
concatenated multitude of underlying contingent forces and factors.
Similarly, the thriving plethora of contingencies of the baseless ontolog-
ical base of weak nature permit, through their anarchic interplay, the
emergent bubbling up of aggressively assertive and stubborn loci that
become the centers of gravity for swirling vortices of self-relating kinet-
ics (including those counting as autonomous subjects). More precisely,
with his extrapolations from Sophocles in the preceding quotation,
Hegel suggests that human beings are portions of nature playing off
portions of their own natures (through habit and other artifices meticu-
lously catalogued in the Philosophy of Mind) and portions of their sur-
rounding natural environs against each other, thereby taking advan-
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tage of the wiggle room provided by nature’s insufficient strength (qua

necessitating power of intra-natural rules and regulations extinguish-
ing contingency in advance) so as to carve out some breathing space for
themselves as free agents—as the cliché has it, fighting fire with fire
(or, indeed, with water). Last but not least, he significantly qualifies
the degree to which, at least in the spheres of practical activity, human
subjects, as still themselves internal foldings of the nature upon which
they work, can assert themselves against nature as their self-Othering
Other (“Nature herself, however, in her universal aspect, he [man] can-
not overcome in this way, nor can he turn her to his own purposes”).
Whether attainable or not at the theoretical-epistemological level, abso-
lute (over and above relative) autonomy at the practical-ontological
level is out of reach.
Later on in the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel anticipates, among other
things, his aforementioned discussion of habit in the “Anthropology”
sub-section of the Philosophy of Mind. A Zusatz elaborates:
In human beings particularly, this evenness of configuration is
again made asymmetrical [Ungleichheit] by occupation, habit,
activity, and intelligence in general. As an intelligent being, man
concentrates his efforts mainly on a single point, comes to a point,
as it were; but not merely to a mouth for animal nourishment (like
the animal’s mouth which Nature has shaped to a point); on the
contrary, man alters his shape, turning his individuality outwards
and so individualizing his bodily strength at one point of his body
and concentrating it on one side—for a particular purpose, e.g.
writing—rather than holding it in equilibrium [Gleichgewicht]. (PN
355Z)
He adds a few sentences below, “man . . . voluntarily introduces

inequality [Ungleichheit]” (PN 355Z). This characteristic, defining
asymmetry/imbalance (Ungleichheit) distinguishing willful human life
forms from others is allowed for by virtue of an undergirding absence of
an overriding, strong natural-cosmic balance. Dialectically put, the
deficit of the minus of Nature’s weakness, as already being in states of
disequilibrium, enables the excess of the plus of Spirit’s potent sponta-
neous capacities for further disequilibriating creations and destructions.
An additional caveat is essential: Nature’s weakness qua contin-
gency holds both between the folds of nature (as per, for instance,
Hegel’s division of his Naturphilosophie into mechanics, physics, and
organics) as well as within the specifically organic strata and tiers in
which flesh and blood human beings are situated. If, as I have pur-
ported, Hegel is a strong emergentist avant la lettre, not only is he not
completely under the spell of a German-Romantic kind of universal
(w)holism, as sometimes depicted by various exegetes—he requires, as
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integral to his cherished philosophy of free subjectivity, the effective

existence of discontinuities within and between nature’s multiple
dimensions. At least specifically within the realms of the organic, the
swerves of the contingent (as the weakness/impotence of the natural)
help make possible the breaks and ruptures engendering the founda-
tions of human freedom. In Lacanian-Žižekian parlance, no big Other of
a global natural economy lords it over Hegelian Natur with an iron fist
of exhaustively integrating necessity, a smothering, stifling hand
squelching in advance the possible genesis of autonomous subjects.
Another cautionary note must be sounded here before I proceed to a
few final remarks. My Hegel-indebted transcendental materialist the-
ory of subjectivity is by no means committed to a vulgar, uncomplicated
teleology. To be more exact, I do not endorse any narrative according to
which the immanent genesis of human subjects out of material nature
is a foregone conclusion, an inevitability destined from time immemo-
rial to come to fruition sooner or later. There’s no regressively going
back behind the Darwin-event. I accept and affirm that the emergence
of human beings, with their distinguishing peculiarities, is itself an
absolutely contingent development in the physical universe.
And, I’d go further and submit that Hegel, again contra prevailing
interpretive orthodoxy, is not the crude teleological thinker he’s all too
frequently made out to be (and this despite his pre-Darwin resistance to
the idea of natural evolution). To take the example of the Phenomenology,
which, as Hegel’s first magnum opus, sets the stage for much of the
rest of his later philosophizing, it appears therein that a deep, irre-
sistible current of progress functions as an undertow carrying the fig-
ures of non-philosophical consciousness along a preordained pathway
leading to the telos of philosophical “Absolute Knowing.” Moreover, this
odyssey seems to be laid out in a particular order of stages and phases
forming a fixed, necessary sequence through which consciousness is
condemned to journey under the pre-arranged schedule of an always
already established logical/metaphysical itinerary. But, the case can be
made that, for Hegel, nothing guarantees in advance that progress will
occur. Any progress is an after the fact effect to be discerned only
retroactively (and whose temporally antecedent causes are contingen-
cies); any necessity, as the preface to the Philosophy of Right spells out
with pointed frankness, can be seen solely by the Owl of Minerva.108
Stated with greater precision, in the Phenomenology, a dialectically
self-generated deadlock or impasse afflicting a shape of consciousness
does not contain within itself the promise of the fated actual arrival of a
progressive step beyond qua a resolution or exit. The immanent cri-
tiques of themselves these shapes produce, as determinate negations in
the technical Hegelian sense, merely outline what a resolution/exit
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could be if—this “if” arguably is a matter of conditional contingency

rather than teleological necessity—a new figure of consciousness, one
fulfilling what is demanded in terms of a resolution/exit, happens to
come along in the future course of time. The dialectical self-subversions
of consciousness, through their immanent determinate negations of
themselves, just sketch the rough contours of what a possible solution
to the problems they create for themselves would have to look like if
such a solution arrives unpredictably one fine day. In other words, the
thus-generated foreshadowings of subsequent progress, in the guise of
approximate criteria for what would count as moving forward past spe-
cific cul-de-sacs, do not have the authoritative power to assure, as a
matter of a simplistic teleology, the popping up in factual reality of
realized escapes from these quagmires. Whether or not consciousness
remains stuck is, ultimately, a matter of chance, left up to the caprice
of the contingent.
I believe that the same considerations apropos teleology in the
Phenomenology can be brought to bear on Hegel’s Naturphilosophie.
That is to say, for each locality of weak qua not whole nature, as for
each shape of consciousness, nothing guarantees that anything of a
higher order of complexity inevitably will congeal out of and in relation
to a specific regional configuration of nature. Hence, with reference to
the Realphilosophie of the Encyclopedia, I could maintain that both the
emergence of the organic out of the mechanical and the physical as well
as the emergence of human life out of the organic are contingencies
ontologically speaking. Hegel’s talk of these emergences as instances of
“progress” need not be construed as symptomatic of a nowadays
unpalatable onto-theological teleology of an unsophisticated sort.
Instead, whether natural-philosophical functionalist criteria for pro-
gression to higher forms really are fulfilled by actually existing beings
is up to chance. But, if things of this type indeed do occur, then these
criteria enable such occurrences to be theoretically recognized, regis-
tered, and known in their proper specificity, of only after the fact.
The first sentence of the last paragraph of the Phenomenology
employs the theologically-laden word “kenosis” (PS 808). A traditional
Christian definition of kenosis uses this concept-term to designate the
act of creation in which the infinite immaterial God of transcendence
empties himself out into the immanence of the hence-created finitude of
material being(s). The entire preceding re-reading of Hegel I’ve fur-
nished here indicates that Hegelian kenosis is the inverse of this
Christian definition of the word. The delineation of the real-philosophi-
cal becoming-subject of substance, as perhaps “the oldest agenda of
Hegelianism” (as I entitled it earlier with reference to Hegel’s 1796
“Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus”), is a reverse
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kenosis, namely genesis from the ground up of a transcendence-in-

immanence, with the material substance of a weak nature alone empty-
ing itself out into the void like negativity of more than material subjec-
tivity as “the night of the world.”
As I observed quite some time ago, Hegel links the historical genesis
of modern secular science in the seventeenth century to Judeo-
Christianity. From Christianity, science takes its assumption of a sta-
ble, unchanging order governing the universe with its timeless laws;
from Judaism, it takes the dedivinization of thereby banalized physical
reality. One of the guiding programs of transcendental materialism is to
execute sublations of science’s sublations of Judaism and Christianity (a
sublation of sublation in line with the logic of a Hegelian dialectical
“negation of negation”). Carrying out this task would facilitate a transi-
tion from merely secular science, still burdened with the residues and
remainders of its religious/theological past, to a truly atheistic scientific
paradigm. The sciences will become authentically atheist if and only if
each and every lingering investment in a Nature (with a capital N),
another big Other surreptitiously substituting for the pre-scientific
Gods of Judeo-Christianity, is worked through and put in its proper
place. Against Christianity, the legislating One-All, with its avatars
and emissaries, must be exorcized. Against Judaism, the reduction of
material being to the amassed, atomized aggregate of a flat, mechani-
cal, quantifiable finitude must be dispelled. At the end of Glauben und
Wissen, Hegel trumpets a “speculative Good Friday in place of the his-
toric Good Friday,” vehemently insisting that, “Good Friday must be
speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its
God-forsakenness [der ganzen Wahrheit und Härte seiner Gottlosig-
keit].”109 Depending on whether or not one buys my version of Hegel,
either a renewed appreciation of Hegel’s speculative death of God (FK
190–1) is overdue or a second speculative Good Friday, with no Easter
Sunday to follow, is to be enacted. This is not the Calvary in which the
death of God cum Christ leaves behind the Holy Spirit; this is the
Golgotha in which the disappearance of God cum Nature leaves behind
the human spirit (Geist). What monotheistic fundamentalists find pro-
foundly disturbing about biological science in particular is the promo-
tion therein of logics of bottom-up emergence with no need whatsoever
for positing any top-down impositions descending from a paternal tran-
scendence. They are right to feel threatened. In this connection, Hegel
should scare the hell out of them too.
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels proclaim, “In direct con-
trast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here
we ascend from earth to heaven.”110 With Hegel as the paragon of this
“German philosophy,” my reverse-kenotic reinterpretation mandates
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restating this proclamation as: “In direct fidelity to German philoso-

phy, here we ascend from earth to heaven.” If my materialist and real-
ist rendition of Hegelian philosophy is basically sound, this obviously
has repercussions for the conception of the rapport between Hegelianism
and Marxism. Marx’s best-known pronouncement as regards Hegel’s
philosophy most probably is his insistence, in the first volume of
Capital, on the imperative “to discover the rational kernel within the
mystical shell.”111 The “rational kernel” is much, much bigger in relation
to the “mystical shell” than Marx concedes or recognizes. If I’m correct,
then this thin surface even might have been cracked or shattered from
the beginning. Either way, the time has come to cease being preoccu-
pied with this uninteresting old husk and to start honestly reckoning
with the real Hegel.
NOTES
1. See Adrian Johnston, “Repeating Engels: Renewing the Cause of the

Materialist Wager for the Twenty-First Century,” Theory @ Buffalo 15:1
(2011) pp. 141–82, 60; “Second Natures in Dappled Worlds: John
McDowell, Nancy Cartwright, and Hegelian-Lacanian Materialism,” in
Umbr(a): The Worst, ed. Matthew Rigilano and Kyle Fetter (Buffalo:
Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture [SUNY at Buffalo],
2011), pp. 71–92; A Weak Nature Alone: Prolegomena to Any Future
Materialism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [under
review]), vol. 2.
2. See Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 107–9.
3. See Stephen Houlgate, introduction to Hegel and the Philosophy of
Nature, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), pp. xi–xii;
Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History,
2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 106.
4. See Alain Lacroix, Hegel: La philosophie de la nature (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 12–3.
5. See Michael John Petry, introduction to G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of
Nature, trans. Michael John Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1970), vol. 1, pp. 21, 114–5.
6. See Alison Stone, Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), pp. xi–xiii.
7. See Johnston, “Second Natures in Dappled Worlds,” pp. 77–8, 80–1.
8. Emmanuel Renault, “Hegel a-t-il écrit une Naturphilosophie?,” in Lectures
de Hegel, ed. Olivier Tinland (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2005), pp.
196–222.
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9. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1975), pp. 27, 39–40, 44–5, 537–71.
10. See Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Conscious-
ness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 3–6, 259–60;
Robert B. Pippin, “The Kantian Aftermath: Reaction and Revolution in
Modern German Philosophy,” chap. 2 of The Persistence of Subjectivity: On
the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2005, pp.
47–9.
11. See Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), pp. xiii, 5–8.
12. Taylor, Hegel, pp. 351–2.
13. Ibid., p. 354.
14. Robert B. Pippin, “Leaving Nature Behind, or Two Cheers for
‘Subjectivism’: On John McDowell,” chap. 9 of The Persistence of
Subjectivity, p. 189.
15. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, “Psychical Treatment (or Mental
Treatment),” in vol. 5 of The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 283; Totem and Taboo, in vol. 13 of The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960), p. 76; Introductory Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis, in vol. 15 of The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1963), p. 20; “The Resistances to Psycho-Analysis,” in vol.
19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961),
p. 215.
16. See Petry, introduction to G.W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, pp.
79–82, 115.
17. See Georg Lukács, “What is Orthodox Marxism?,” in History and Class
Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 24; “The Changing Function of
Historical Materialism,” in History and Class Consciousness, p. 234;
“Tailism and the Dialectic,” in A Defense of History and Class
Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie, (London:
Verso, 2000), pp. 100, 102; Johnston, “Repeating Engels,” pp. 141-8.
18. See Béatrice Longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics, trans. Nicole J.
Simek, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. xiii.
19. See Ibid., p. 3.
20. See Johnston, “Repeating Engels,” pp.144–8.
21. Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory
of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), pp.
125–44; John W. Burbidge, Hegel’s Systematic Contingency (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 16–7, 41–3, 47.
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22. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York:
Dover Publications, 1956), p. 447; my emphasis; henceforth PH, followed
by page number.
23. G.W.F. Hegel, “The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism,” trans.
Henry Silton Harris, in Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Jon
Stewart (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), p. 110.
24. Ibid.
25. See PH 416–7, 422–3, 435, 441–3, 446–7, 449; G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on
Logic: Berlin, 1831, trans. Clark Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008), §53; Adrian Johnston, “Think Big: Toward a Grand
Neuropolitics—or, Why I am not an Immanent Naturalist or Vital
Materialist,” in Neuroscience and Political Theory: Thinking the Body
Politic, ed. Frank Vander Valk (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 156–77.
26. See Murray Greene, Hegel on the Soul: A Speculative Anthropology (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), p. 46.
27. Adrian Johnston, “Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing
to The Parallax View,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism
37:1 (2007), p. 4; Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, p. 241; See also Adrian
Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity
Materialized,” in Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics and the
Dialectic, ed. Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Slavoj Žižek (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
28. Slavoj Žižek, “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian
Reading of Christianity,” in Slavoj Ži ž ek and John Milbank, The
Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ed. Creston Davis
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 82.
29. G.W.F. Hegel, “The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism,” p.110;
German cited from G.W.F. Hegel, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des
deutschen Idealismus,” in Frühe Schriften, vol. 1 of Werke, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1971), p. 234.
30. See Ibid.
31. G.W.F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” in Early
Theological Writings, trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), pp. 266, 273.
32. G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. and ed. Walter Cerf and
Henry Silton Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), p. 169; henceforth FK,
followed by page number.
33. F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew
Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 120.
34. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold Vincent Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §16; henceforth PS, followed by
section number (German citations from this text refer to G.W.F. Hegel,
Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 3 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
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Karl Markus Michel [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970]). G.W.F. Hegel,

Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. Elizabeth Sanderson
Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), vol.
3, pp. 268–9; henceforth LHP, followed by volume and page number.
35. Gérard Lebrun, La patience du concept: Essai sur le discours hégélien
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 146; all translations of this text are my own.
36. Ibid., p. 145–6.
37. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith
(New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1965), Bxvi–xvii.
38. F.W.J. Schelling, Bruno, or, On the Natural and the Divine Principle of
Things, trans. Michael G. Vater (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), pp. 136,
143.
39. G.W.F. Hegel, Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der
Philosophie, Jenaer Schriften, 1801–1807, vol. 2 of Werke, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p.
96; henceforth DFFS, followed by page number; all translations of this
text follow G.W.F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s
System of Philosophy, trans. Henry Silton Harris and Walter Cerf
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1977) p. 156; henceforth DFS, followed by page
number.
40. G.W.F. Hegel, “Fragment of a System,” trans. Richard Kroner, in
Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, p. 154; G.W.F. Hegel,
“Systemfragment von 1800,” vol. 1 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 422.
41. G.W.F. Hegel, Die Naturphilosophie, vol. 9 of Enzyklopädie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften, vols. 8–9 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer
and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), §249Z; all transla-
tions of this text follow G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, pt. 2 of the
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. Arnold Vincent Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), §249Z; henceforth PN, followed
by section number and, where relevant, Z indicating the citation is from
one of the Zusätze (“additions”) of the posthumous edition of Hegel’s
works.
42. Kenneth R. Westphal, “Philosophizing about Nature: Hegel’s
Philosophical Project,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and
Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 305n. 71.
43. Ibid.
44. See Willem A. DeVries, Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity: An Introduction
to Theoretical Spirit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 42–6;
henceforth HTM, followed by page number.
45. See, for example, Kenneth R. Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemological Realism
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. x, 1, 7, 100–4, 140–5;
William Maker, “The Very Idea of the Idea of Nature, or Why Hegel Is
152
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Not an Idealist,” Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, pp. 3–5, 14–5; Stone,
Petrified Intelligence, p. 22; Johnston, “Second Natures in Dappled
Worlds,” pp. 74–5, 77–8, 80–1.
46. See F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel, “Introduction for the Critical
Journal of Philosophy: On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism
Generally, and Its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in
Particular,” trans. Henry Silton Harris, in Miscellaneous Writings of
G.W.F. Hegel, pp. 211–3, 215–6; G.W.F. Hegel, “How the Ordinary Human
Understanding Takes Philosophy (as Displayed in the Works of Mr.
Krug),” trans. Henry Silton Harris, in Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F.
Hegel, p. 229; FK 59; G.W.F. Hegel, First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of
the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4), System of Ethical Life and
First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. Henry Silton Harris and Thomas
Malcolm Knox (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979), pp. 209–10, 224–5.
47. See Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, pp. 178–210.
48. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie des Geistes, Jenaer Systement-wüfre III:
Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des Geistes, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1987), p. 172; the translation follows that of
Donald Phillip Verene in his Hegel’s Recollection (Albany: SUNY Press,
1985), pp. 7–8.
49. Ibid.
50. G.W.F. Hegel, Die Philosophie des Geistes, vol. 10 of the Enzyklopädie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften, vols. 8–10 of Werke; all translations of
this text follow G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, pt.2 of the
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. Arnold Vincent Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), ¶453; henceforth PM, followed
by paragraph number and, where relevant, Z indicating the citation is
from one of the Zusätze (“additions”) of the posthumous edition of Hegel’s
works.
51. Louis Althusser, “Man, That Night,” in The Spectre of Hegel: Early
Writings, trans. G. Michael Goshgarian, ed. François Matheron (New
York: Verso, 1997), p. 170.
52. Ibid.
53. See Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature.”
54. Adrian Johnston, “‘Naturalism or Anti-Naturalism? No, Thanks—Both
Are Worse!’: Science, Materialism, and Slavoj Ži ž ek ,” La Revue
Internationale de Philosophie, special issue: “On Slavoj Žižek,” (forthcom-
ing); Johnston, “Second Natures in Dappled Worlds,” pp. 168–70, 175–6.
55. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and
Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 73.
56. See Hegel, First Philosophy of Spirit, pp. 227–8.
57. G.W.F. Hegel, Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des
Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein
Verhältnis zu den positiven Rechtswissenschaften, vol. 2 of Werke, ed. Eva
153
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Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) p.

528; all translations of this text follow G.W.F. Hegel, Natural Law: The
Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy,
and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, trans. Thomas Malcolm
Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 131.
58. See Alexandre Kojève, introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on
the Phenomenology of Sprit, trans. James H. Nicholas, ed. Raymond
Queneau and Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp.
16–30, 45–64, 224–32.
59. Hegel, First Philosophy of Spirit, p. 227–8; Hegel, Natural Law, p. 91.
60. Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, pp. 125–7, 180–94.
61. See Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G.W.F. Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp.
401–2.
62. See Taylor, Hegel, pp. 161–2.
63. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, p. 402n. 126.
64. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 81.
65. See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Together with a
Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God, 3 vols., trans. Ebenezer Brown
Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson, ed. Ebenezer Brown Speirs (New York:
Humanities Press, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 184–9; G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the
Philosophy of Religion, One-Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827, trans.
Robert F. Brown, Peter Crafts Hodgson, J. Michael Stewart, and Henry
Silton Harris, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), pp. 364–5.
66. See Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in
the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2011), p. 27.
67. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. Arnold Vincent Miller (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 584.
68. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxii–xiv.
69. See Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature, “ pp. 162-70; Johnston,
“‘Naturalism or Anti-Naturalism? No, Thanks—Both Are Worse!’”; Adrian
Johnston, “Turning the Sciences Inside Out: Revisiting Lacan’s ‘Science
and Truth,’” Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l’Analyse and
Contemporary French Thought, ed. Peter Hallward, Christian Kerslake,
and Knox Peden (New York: Verso, forthcoming); Johnston, “Second
Natures in Dappled Worlds”; Adrian Johnston, The Outcome of
Contemporary French Philosophy: Prolegomena to Any Future
Materialism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming),
vol. 1.
70. See Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, pp. 119–20, 164.
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71. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. John Henry Bernard
(New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1951), §§64–5.
72. PS 249, 280. Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, pp. 84–5.
73. PS 249, 280. Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, p. 85.
74. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Hegel’s Appropriation of Kant’s Account of
Teleology in Nature,” in Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, ed. Stephen
Houlgate (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 178.
75. See Greene, Hegel on the Soul: A Speculative Anthropology, pp. ix, 11–2,
46, 141.
76. G.W.F. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe II: Logik, Metaphysik,
Naturphilosophie, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner,
1982), pp. 188–9; henceforth JS, followed by page number; all translations
of this text follow G.W.F. Hegel, The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and
Metaphysics, trans. and ed. John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni
(Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), p. 185; henceforth
TJS, followed by page number.
77. Greene, Hegel on the Soul, pp. 48–9, 53–4, 114, 121, 133, 155–6.
78. See G.W.F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit,
pp. 103–4, 106–7; Hegel, First Philosophy of Spirit, pp. 230–1, 246–9; PS
190.
79. G.W.F. Hegel, “‘Philosophical Dissertation on the Orbits of the Planets’
and the Habilitation Theses,” trans. Pierre Adler, Miscellaneous Writings
of G.W.F. Hegel, p. 171; G.W.F. Hegel, “Habilitationsthesen,” in vol. 2 of
Werke, p. 533.
80. See Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel, “Introduction
for the Critical Journal of Philosophy,” in Miscellaneous Writings, pp.
214–6; “How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy,”
Miscellaneous Writings, p. 231; DFS 90, 95–6, 158–9; FK 107–8, 112–3;
LHP 3:257–60; Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: Éditions la
Découverte, 1990), pp. 11–2, 17, 20–1, 31; Beiser, Hegel, pp. 59, 91–3.
81. See G.W.F. Hegel, “Who Thinks Abstractly?,” trans. Walter Kaufmann, in
Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, pp. 284–5; JS 80, 108, 175; PS 1;
G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, pt. 1 of the Encyclopedia of
Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. Théodore F. Geraets,
Wallis Arthur Suchting, and Henry Silton Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1991), §163; henceforth EL, followed by section
number and, where relevant, Z, indicating the citation is from one of the
Zusätze (“additions”) of the posthumous edition of Hegel’s works.
82. Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 843–4; German text refers to G.W.F. Hegel,
Wissenschaft der Logik, vols. 5–6 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl
Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), vol. 6, p. 573.
83. EL 236; The German text cited refers to G.W.F. Hegel, Die Wissenschaft
der Logik, vol. 8 of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften,
155
FINAL 7/3/12 6:43 PM Page 156
vols. 8–10 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), §236.
84. T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets (Orlando: Harcourt Press,
1971), p. 59.
85. Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 843–4.
86. Hegel, Lectures on Logic, §244.
87. See Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 137–54; EL 93–5.
88. EL 244; Cf., Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 843–4.
89. EL 244Z; Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 843–4.
90. G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Logik: Berlin, 1831, ed. Udo Rameil
and Hans-Christian Lucas (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2001), §244; Hegel,
Lectures on Logic, §244.
91. See Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, p. 107.
92. See PN 76; PM 381, 388, 389; See also Lacroix, Hegel, p. 61; Houlgate, An
Introduction to Hegel, p. 180.
93. See PN 370; due to a discrepancy between the English and German
Editions of The Philosophy of Nature, the relevant German text can be
found in §368; G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Geschichte, vol. 12 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus
Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 88–9, 106; PH 126.
94. See Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, pp. 126–44.
95. See Malabou, The Future of Hegel, pp. 73–4, 160–4, 183.
96. See Gérard Lebrun, L’envers de la dialectique: Hegel à la lumière de
Nietzsche (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), pp. 25–72.
97. See Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, p. 82.
98. See PS §§300–2, 307–9, 312, 316, 318–20, 322, 335–7, 339–41, 343–4, 346;
See also John Findlay, “The Hegelian Treatment of Biology and Life,”
Hegel and the Sciences, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 92–3; Pinkard,
Hegel’s Phenomenology, pp. 84–7.
99. See, for example, Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, pp. 168–9.
100. Stone, Petrified Intelligence, pp. 1–2, 4–6, 8.
101. Lacroix, Hegel, p. 61.
102. Ibid., p. 55.
103. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 106; Hegel, The
Philosophy of History, p. 80.
104. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, p. 214.
156
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105. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy

(Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973),
p. 105.
106. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 93; Hegel, The
Philosophy of History, p. 69.
107. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Hugh Barr
Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), §138Z; G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, vol. 7
of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1970), §138Z.
108. See Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, p. 23.
109. G.W.F. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen oder Reflexionsphilosophie der
Subjektivität in der Vollständigkeit ihrer Formen als Kantische,
Jacobische und Fichtesche Philosophie, vol. 2 of Werke, p. 432; FK, 191.
110. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part One with
Selections from Parts Two and Three, Together with Marx’s “Introduction
to a Critique of Political Economy.” ed. Christopher John Arthur, (New
York: International Publishers, 1988), p. 47.
111. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 vols., trans. Ben
Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), vol. 1, p. 103.
157

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FINAL 7/3/12 6:43 PM Page 103

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

The Voiding of Weak Nature

1. Revivifying Hegel—Breathing New Life into a Possible

Not many of Hegel’s commentators and critics bother to refer

GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL

Of course, such things as Hegel’s advocacy of Goethe’s theory of color